Reading this thread made me start to think about why a string is a sequence, and I can't actually see any obvious reason, other than historical ones. Every use case I can think of for iterating over a string either involves first splitting the string, or would be better done with a regex. Also, the only times I can recall using a string as a sequence is in doctests (because it reads better than a list of characters) or in the interpreter when I'm trying something out. I'm not suggesting changing it - there's too much history for that, but I am interested to know if there is some fundamental reason that strings are sequences. If a new string object was being implemented now, would it be a sequence? On 3 Jan 2014 02:49, "Guido van Rossum" <guido@python.org> wrote:
By designing an API that doesn't require such overloading.
On Thursday, January 2, 2014, Alexander Heger wrote:
isinstance(x, Iterable) and not isinstance(x, str)
If you find yourself typing that a lot I think you have a bigger problem though.
How do you replace this? _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
-- --Guido van Rossum (on iPad)
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