[Python-Dev] Rationale for sum()'s design? (original) (raw)

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 14 13:12:59 CET 2005


On Mar 14, 2005, at 11:20, Nick Coghlan wrote: ...

Somewhat ugly, but backwards compatible:

I realize you're mostly talking semantics, not implementation, but, as long as we're at it, could we pretty please have back the optimization indicated by...:

# Add the elements

if isinstance(value, basestring):
   return value + ''.join(itr)

for item in itr: value += item return value

...? This doesn't break bw compat since currently when value's a string sum would raise an exception...

Alex



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