strange behaviour of sum()

[Inyeol Lee]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 11:46:07PM +0100, Jan-Erik Meyer-Lütgens wrote:
[...]
> I'd ran into trouble when I've used sum() naively:
[...]
> The other strange behaviour is:
> 
>     sum(['my', 'pet', 'fish', 'eric'], '')
> 
> results in:
> 
>     TypeError: sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]
> 
> If there is a special treatment for strings, why doesn't sum()
> use ''.join(seq) itself, instead of telling me that I should
> use it? But in fact sum() should call operator.add(), even
> for strings:

There was a duscussion on this in python-dev. See thread starting from

    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034767.html

and Guido's summary at

    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034853.html

.

-Inyeol Lee