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inconsistency with += between different types ?

Andreas Leitgeb Andreas.Leitgeb at siemens.at
Fri Aug 9 11:35:14 EDT 2002 
Huaiyu Zhu <huaiyu at gauss.almadan.ibm.com> wrote:
> Implementation.  Even though (logically) __iadd__ does not make sense for
> immutable types, the proposal does not forbid it.
Actually it indirectly does.
If an immutable class defined __iadd__  as a copy of __add__ (for 
  performance reason, as was pointed out),  then after the proposal, 
  using += on an instance of that class will end up having no effect 
  at all :-(
I consider this copying a bad thing anyway, and "performance" a poor
  excuse for it, but I'm definitely not the one asked to judge it. 

> There are other ways to solve this problem.  One is splitting the
> two semantics into two symbols like += and +!, for example.  
With such a semantic I would not even have started this thread, (as the 
compiler would have reminded me that += on tuples,ints and strings would 
have been illegal).

Anyway, splitting up these semantics at this time would surely invalidate 
much more existing code, than ignoring the returnvalue of __iadd__.

> Another is to allow a definition like __iadd__=None to indicate the 
> rebinding semantics, for example.  
Assigning None to __iadd__ currently "invalidates" += altogether for 
 that class, leading to an Exception for calling something uncallable.  
 I don't know, whether existing classes make use of that behaviour.
If detecting a None is/were considerably faster than detecting NotFounds, it
 may be worth adding to the proposal.

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