[Python-ideas] Python 4: Concatenation

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 12:51:26PM +0100, Jamie Willis wrote:

> Just as an aside, if a concatenation operator *was* included, a suitable
> operator would be "++", 

As mentioned earlier in this thread, that is not possible in Python as 
syntactically `x ++ y` would be parsed as `x + (+y)` (the plus binary 
operator followed by the plus unary operator).

> this is the concatenation operator in languages
> like Haskell (for strings) and the majority of Scala cases. Alternatively
> "<>" is an alternative, being the monoidal append operator in Haskell,
> which retains a certain similarly.

"<>" is familiar to many people as "not equal" in various programming 
languages, including older versions of Python. I'm not entirely sure 
what connection "<>" has to append, it seems pretty arbitrary to me, 
although in fairness nearly all operators are arbitrary symbols if you 
go back far enough.


-- 
Steve