On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:49:32 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote: > Steve Howell <showel...@yahoo.com> writes: >> The documentation is pretty clear on the intention that sum() is >> intended for numbers: ... > > I've never been big on the idea of duck-typing addition. Who would have > thought that (1,2,3)+(4.5.6) was something other than the vector sum?
But your arguments are tuples, not vectors. There are languages which do treat arithmetic operations on vectors as vector operations, as do (e.g.) H-P scientific calculators. That's a fine design choice, and it works for languages where the emphasis is on scientific calculations. But Python is a more generalist language, so in my mind it is more appropriate to treat lists as generic lists, and not numeric vectors: [1, 2, 3] + [4, "a"] => [1, 2, 3, 4, "a"] just as "123" + "4a" => "1234a" -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list