Implicit lists

[holger krekel]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> holger krekel wrote:
>    ...
> > hmmm. Maybe with a general-purpose
> > 
> >     def elems(*args):
> >         l = []
> >         for arg in args:
> >             try: l.extend(arg)
> >             except TypeError: l.append(arg)
> >         return l
> 
> Alas, doesn't meet specs...:

I presume you refer to this part 

[dale]
    In other words, I want to be able to treat an argument of arbitrary
    type as a list of 1 if it isn't already a list.

which isn't an overly explicit specification.  In particular, 
it doesn't imply that strings are to be excluded.  

But i agree that grouping into 'non-iterables except strings and 
unicode' on one side and everything else on the other side most 
often makes sense.   

> [alex at lancelot mydata]$ python2.2
> Python 2.2.2 (#1, Oct 24 2002, 11:43:01)
> [GCC 2.96 20000731 (Mandrake Linux 8.2 2.96-0.76mdk)] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> a=[]
> >>> a.extend('ciao')
> >>> a
> ['c', 'i', 'a', 'o']
> >>>
> 
> basically, l.extend now accepts all iterables.

Sure. It's been like this since Python-2.1. Previously
it threw an TypeError. 

ciao,

    holger