"tostring" as a string method?

[Andrew Dalke]

Warren Postma said:
> Why not write str(dna) and overload __str__ where necessary?

> class myClass:
>  def __init__(self,value='something'):
>    self.value ='something'
>  def __str__(self):
>    return self.value
>
> myObject = myClass()

What I am looking for is a way to have the "value" be a string
or an array.array or even a Numeric.array.  The solution you have
only works for strings.  Adding a "tostring()" method to strings
would let me have a

  def __str__(self): return self.value.tostring()

/F pointed out the buffer interface, which is the route I'm
going to look at - I'm only using strings now because it turns
out building up a [] and string.join'ing them is faster than
using an array.array.  (Though I have ways to make arrays be
faster.)

Meanwhile, on the biopthon.org list, Jeff Chang pointed out that
__str__ is in general an ill-defined quantity.  The usual
interpretation is that __str__ returns a human-representation while
__repr__ returns a computer representation.  So using __str__
to return the character stream is not the right interface.  We're
now using "tostring()", which is more obvious.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at acm.org