[Python-Dev] Re: string.find() again (was Re: timsort for jython)

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Perhaps it makes sense to allow "'thon' in 'python'" to return True,
> > but still have "[1,2] in [0,1,2,3]" return False if we loosen the
> > steadfast requirement that strings and lists be as much alike as
> > possible.
>
> That was never a requirement.  Strings and lists are merely similar
> insofar as they have very similar needs for a slicing and subscripting
> notation, and to a lesser extent for concatenation, repetition and
> comparison.

Perhaps what Skip meant was that strings and lists are both like
sequences.  At the moment, the meaning of "in" has two general
definitions: one for sequence-like objects and one for mapping-like
objects.  The former is something along the lines of "e is in s if
there exists an i such that s[i] == e".

The question from a teaching perspective is: "Are strings a kind of
sequence?"


-- ?!ng