[Python-Dev] [slighly OT] Native speakers and hurting brains (original) (raw)

Boris Borcic bborcic at gmail.com
Tue Jul 11 17:35:10 CEST 2006

Fredrik Lundh wrote:

Boris Borcic wrote:

in what language [is] the word "sum" an appropriate synonym for "concatenate" ?

any that admits a+b to mean ''.join([a,b]), I'd say.

and what human language would that be ?

Let's admit the answer is 'none' (and I apologize for accusing only English), what is the impact on the idea that natural language intuition is a first rank suspect, to explain the double standard in the Python treatment of str1+str2 and sum([str1,str2]) ?

As for 'concatenate'. To my linguistic intuition it is an ugly elitist jargon word made up for the function, like "we mean to say 'to chain' but don't want to say it to your ears, unless you had latin classes". Admitting such a word as the legal standard eliminates the possibility of synonyms. Makes me think, maybe that word is the root of the problem, for being too ugly to find its way into Python in the first place.

Cheers, BB

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