[issue20478] Avoid inadvertently special casing Counter in statistics module

[Nick Coghlan]

New submission from Nick Coghlan:

As per the python-ideas thread at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2014-February/025226.html the statistics.mode() function currently passes its argument directly to the collections.Counter() constructor. This results in Counter() objects being special-cased rather than treated as ordinary iterables.

For the main API, it seems more appropriate to force treatment as an iterable by calling iter() on the argument before passing it to the Counter() constructor.

I'll file a separate RFE about making it easier and more efficient to use the statistics module with weight/frequency mappings.

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components: Library (Lib)
messages: 209930
nosy: gregory.p.smith, larry, ncoghlan, oscarbenjamin, stevenjd, wolma
priority: release blocker
severity: normal
stage: test needed
status: open
title: Avoid inadvertently special casing Counter in statistics module
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.4

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue20478>
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