[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 292 - Simpler String Substitutions (original) (raw)

Michael Chermside mcherm at mcherm.com
Mon Aug 23 19:04:55 CEST 2004

Tim Peters writes:

The same applies to string.join(iterable), for that matter.

Clark Evans writes:

This code-snippet is littered everwhere in my applications:

string.join([str(x) for x in iterable]) Its tedious and makes code hard to read. Do we need a PEP to fix this?

I'm convinced! Of course any code like the following would break:

class Item: # ... def eq(self, other): "All Items are equal!" return isinstance(other, Item)

def process_item(item): """Processes an item, returning a string.""" # ...

def process_items(items): """This processes each Item in the list and returns a string containing the entire thing.""" while True: try: return ','.join(items) except TypeError: pos = items.index(Item()) # find first Item items[pos] = process_item( items[pos] ) continue

Seriously, I can't think of a sane use for .join() raising a TypeError, so I'd say run it by Guido and if it doesn't offend his design intuition, let's fix it!

-- Michael Chermside

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