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Argument against iterable ints...

Magnus Lie Hetland mlh at vier.idi.ntnu.no
Sun Apr 7 14:06:21 EDT 2002 
In article <just-D808D9.08280107042002 at news1.xs4all.nl>, Just van Rossum wrote:
>[Magnus Lie Hetland]
>> Just a situation that cropped up recently: While writing a little
>> generator for flattening nested iterables, I used
>>
>>   try: iter(foo)
>>   except: return foo
>>   else:
>>       ....
>>
>> (of course I could have used a for loop directly in the try clause --
>> that doesn't change anything.)
>>
>> If integers became iterable, this sort of code would suddenly become
>> infinitely recursive. Given the propensity for using exceptions in
>> this manner rather than type checking in Python, this seems like a
>> weighty argument to me...
>
>No matter how I dislike iterable ints, this argument stinks, as the 
>situation you describe already exists with strings: each element of a 
>string is itself a string and...

Yes. And I think that stinks. The fact that we have one such problem
in the language is no reason to add another.

Oh, well.

>Just

--
Magnus Lie Hetland                                  The Anygui Project
http://hetland.org                                  http://anygui.org
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