On Oct 17, 1:16 am, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > Alan G Isaac wrote: > > > As Tim explained in detail, and as Peter > > explained with brevity, whether it will > > happen or not, it should happen. This > > conversation has confirmed that current > > behavior is a wart: an error is raised > > despite correct semantics. Ugly! > > The fact that two or three people who agree on something agree on the > thing that they agree on confirms nothing. One could just as well argue > that summing anything but numbers is semantically incoherent, not > correct. Certainly, my dictionary points in that direction. > > tjr
I agree here. I don't think it's a case of "warning about inefficiency" that Python doesn't sum strings, but rather that 'summing' strings doesn't make sense. An OTT example could be sum(['010111010', '372']) # Binary and decimal Sum should return a *numeric* result, it has no way to do anything sensible with strings -- that's up to the coder and I think it'd be an error in Python to not raise an error. Jon. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list