[Python-Dev] sum(...) limitation

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Alexander Belopolsky writes:
 > On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 3:08 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>
 > wrote:
 > 
 > > All the suggestions
 > > I've seen so far are (IMHO, YMMV) just as ugly as the present
 > > situation.
 > >
 > 
 > What is ugly about allowing strings?  CPython certainly has a way to to
 > make sum(x, '')

sum(it, '') itself is ugly.  As I say, YMMV, but in general last I
heard arguments that are usually constants drawn from a small set of
constants are considered un-Pythonic; a separate function to express
that case is preferred.  I like the separate function style.

And that's the current situation, except that in the case of strings
it turns out to be useful to allow for "sums" that have "glue" at the
joints, so it's spelled as a string method rather than a builtin: eg,
", ".join(paramlist).

Actually ... if I were a fan of the "".join() idiom, I'd seriously
propose 0.sum(numeric_iterable) as the RightThang{tm].  Then we could
deprecate "".join(string_iterable) in favor of "".sum(string_iterable)
(with the same efficient semantics).