[Python-Dev] Mini-Pep: An Empty String ABC

[Raymond Hettinger]

From: "Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org>
> All this makes me lean towards a rejection of this proposal -- it
> seems worse than no proposal at all. It could perhaps be rescued by
> adding some small set of defined operations.

By subclassing Sequence, we get index() and count() mixins for free.

We can also add other mixin freebies like __hash__(), __eq__(), __ne__(), endswith(), startswith(), find(), rfind(), and rindex().

It's tempting to add center, lust, rjust, and zfill, but those require some sort of constructor that accepts an iterable argument.

As important as what is included are the methods intentionally left out.   I'm trying to avoid insisting on abstractmethods like 
encode(), split(), join(), and other methods that place an undue burden on a class being registered as a String.


Raymond