Mike Meyer wrote: > Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: [...] > Did somebody actually use "Practicality beats purity" as an excuse for > not making list.count and string.count have the same arguments? If so, > I missed it. I certainly don't agree with that - count ought to work > right in this case. > I agree that the two methods are oddly inconsonant. But then since the introduction of the "has substring" meaning for the "in" operator, strings and lists are also inconsistent over that operation.
> >>A suitably factored implementation might handle lists and strings >>with the exact same code and not incur any extra cost at all. That >>type of thing happens all the time here. > I don't think this would make much sense in present-day Python, mostly because there's no such thing as a character, only a string of length one. So a string is actually a sequence of sequences of length one. I guess this is one of those cases where practicality beat purity. It's as though an indexing operation on a list got you a list of length one rather than the element at that index. Strings have always been anomalous in this respect. > > If it happens all the time, you shouldn't have any trouble nameing a > number of things that a majority of users think are misfeatures that > aren't being fixed. Could you do that? > Doubtless he could. Paul's a smart guy. The missing element will be unanimity on the rationale. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list