Argument against iterable ints...

[Just van Rossum]

[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...

Just