On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, Tim Peters wrote:
Are you sure? This is the kind of error where you immediately see what's wrong and move on to the next bug.
It's certainly caught errors for me, and especially when introducing Perl programmers to Python, where "they expect" string+number to convert the string to a number, apparently the opposite of the arbitrary choice Paul prefers.
It's not arbitrary -- the decision is made according to the type of the *operator* rather than the type of the operands. anything + anything returns a number anything . anything returns a string So "34"+0 converts to a number and 34."" converts to a string (i've seen both idioms fairly often). Anyway, i still agree that it's best to avoid automatic coercion between numbers and strings -- since it's now very easy to say int("3") as opposed to import string; string.atoi("3"), there's really no excuse for not being explicit. -- ?!ng "Things are more like they are now than they ever were before." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower