New Python 3.0 string formatting - really necessary?

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2008 12:45:32 +0000, Duncan Booth wrote:

> You seem to have made an unwarranted assumption, namely that a binary
> operator has to compile to a function with two operands. There is no
> particular reason why this has to always be the case: for example, I
> believe that C# when given several strings to add together optimises
> this into a single call to a concatenation method.
> 
> Python *could* do something similar if the appropriate opcodes/methods
> supported more than two arguments:
> 
> a+b+c+d might execute a.__add__(b,c,d) allowing more efficient string
> concatenations or matrix operations, and a%b%c%d might execute as
> a.__mod__(b,c,d).

But that needs special casing strings and ``%`` in the comiler, because 
it might not be always safe to do this on arbitrary objects.  Only in 
cases where the type of `a` is known at compile time and ``a % b`` 
returns an object of ``type(a)``.

Ciao,
	Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch