On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 10:25:57AM -0500, Dan Sommers wrote: > Iterables are ordered collections of values, and outside of > specialized subclasses, we can't expect that adding the values > is meaningful or even possible.
Correct. That's why lists, tuples, strings, bytes and even arrays all define addition as concatentation rather than element-by-element addition. We leave it to specialised libraries and data types, like numpy, to implement element-by-element addition. > "Adding the values" is too > specialized and not general enough for iterables. Correct. That's why join is a specialised string method, rather than a method on more general lists. > And yet the builtin function sum exists and works the way it > does. Yes, because sum is a specialised function whose job is to sum the values of an iterable. What did you think it was, if it wasn't a specialised "sum these values" function? -- Steven _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/7KPNEF5UFT4S4ZQFX6PCCEYRXTPKB65T/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
