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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Jul 12 05:31:13 CEST 2006

Boris Borcic wrote:

sum() is exactly an attractive nuisance by appearing to be an obvious way of chaining strings in a list (without actually being one).

But at least it fails immediately, prompting you to look in another direction.

I admit that there is a step of arguable interpretation from these recorded facts to my diagnostic, but the latter is compatible with the facts. Your version otoh looks more robust in the role of eg creation myth.

I suppose you could call that a linguistic matter, but I don't think it's exclusively a native one. I suspect that only someone with a programmer's warped mind would make the leap from "sum" to "string concatenation" -- whether they were a native English speaker or not.

Also I don't see that my version of events is inconsistent with the messages you quoted either -- at least not so much as to be relegated to a myth!

-- Greg

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