sum and strings

[Paddy]

Sybren Stuvel wrote:
> Paddy enlightened us with:
> > Well, after all the above, there is a question:
> >
> >   Why not make sum work for strings too?
>
> Because of "there should only be one way to do it, and that way should
> be obvious". There are already the str.join and unicode.join methods,
> which are more powerful than sum.
>
> Sybren
I get where you are coming from, but in this case we have a function,
sum, that is not as geeral as it could be. sum is already here, and
works for some types but not for strings which seems an arbitrary
limitation that impede duck typing.

- Pad.

P.S. I can see why, and am used to the ''.join method. A newbie
introduced to sum for integers might naturally try and concatenate
strings using sum too.