PEP 276 (was Re: Status of PEP's?)

[David Eppstein]

In article <mailman.1014938330.6533.python-list at python.org>,
 James_Althoff at i2.com wrote:

> [David Eppstein]
> > Maybe it's as natural as Perl's ability to concatenate numbers?
> 
> I don't appreciate your sarcasm.  Maybe others do.

I'm sorry that my sarcastic tone seems to have obscured what I think is a 
real point: one feature of Python is that, although variables are untyped, 
their values are strongly typed: what you can do with a value depends on 
its type.  So, you can concatenate strings but not integers; you can 
multiply integers but not strings.  The credo "explicit is better than 
implicit" is in part about this: if you want to concatenate the decimal 
representation of two numbers, you should use an explicit function to 
convert the numbers into strings.  Your proposal, by blurring the 
distinction between integers and ranges of integers, decreases this level 
of explicitness in Python.
-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/