Steve Jorgensen wrote:
The only change I am proposing is that the iterability for characters in a string be moved from the string object itself to a view that is returned from a chars() method of the string. Eventually, direct iteratability would be deprecated and then removed.
That sounds completely unnecessary to me. Can you provide any example on the superiority of your proposal (compared to current implementation)? Sorry, but I can see your point. Why do we need to convert a sequence in another sequence or sequence-like object? Where is the advantage? Or are you proposing that strings will not be sequences in Python any longer? Why? How? Are they going to be .... what? In my point of view, there is nothing wrong in modelling strings as sequence (or as lists like Lisp, or arrays like C). It has advantages and caveats... such as any alternative. However, I think that strings as immutable sequences of characters is a nice and efficient solution in Python context (like null-terminated arrays are in C). Really... you need to provide a example on what is wrong with strings in Python now and how you propose to solve that.