On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 2:17 PM, Jon Forrest <nob...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 6/3/2017 4:58 PM, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> A sequence doesn't necessarily "contain" anything. > > > Maybe not always, but doesn't > > "abc" > > contain three characters? Is 'contain' the right word?
That's a tricky thing to pin down. Since it's possible for a sequence to contain itself, or to contain something which contains it, "contain" is clearly not in any physically-equivalent sense. Does the list [1, 2, 3] contain the float value 2.0? Not in any object-identity sense, and not in the sense that you'll get 2.0 by iterating over it, but yes, in the sense of __contains__. So this list "contains", in one sense, objects that may not have existed previously. In the same way, the string "abc" contains three characters, but it may not contain any objects representing them. In an abstract sense, the string DOES contain those characters. So long as we don't discuss the concrete definitions of objects, yes, we're fine. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
