On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:
I can imagine that inter-operation, when appropriate, might work better with addition of a couple of missing __rxxx__ methods, such as the mentioned __rcontains__. Although adding such would affect the implementation of a core syntax feature, it would not affect syntax as such as seen by the user.
The problem with strings isn't really the binary operations like __contains__ - adding __rcontains__ would be a fairly simple extrapolation of the existing approaches. Where it gets really messy for strings is the fact that whereas invoking named methods directly on numbers is rare, invoking them on strings is very common, and some of those methods (e.g. split(), join(), __mod__()) allow or require an iterable rather than a single object. This extends the range of use cases to be covered beyond those with syntactic support to potentially include all string methods that take arguments. Creating minimally surprising semantics for the methods which accept iterables is also rather challenging. It's an interesting idea, but I think it's overkill for the specific problem of making it easier to perform more text-like manipulations in a bytes-only domain. Cheers, NIck. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia