Force anything to be a string.

[Tim Peters]

[Patrick Phalen, on inadvertently stomping builtin function names]
> ...
> How *hard* would it be to implement a warning message for this and is
> it worth it? What marks the difference between a warning and
> an error message?

It's irritatingly difficult, but only because Python has no warning msgs
today.  So it means inventing a whole bunch of machinery and conventions
where none currently exist.  I think it should be done anyway, but since I'm
not volunteering my own time to do it can't whine if nobody else does.

Note that Macs don't have a concept of stdout or stderr, and at least under
Windows the "no DOS box" pythonw variant doesn't have a visible stdout or
stderr.  So there's currently no good place to direct warnings even if there
were some.  That's not a new problem (there's no good place to direct fatal
error msgs either!), but I think Guido would rather see machinery get
invented to address that first.

don't-everyone-rush-in-all-at-once-now<wink>-ly y'rs  - tim