using generators with format strings

[Christopher T King]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, John Lenton wrote:

> does anyone else get the feeling that (str %) should have a third
> behaviour wrt generators? By this I mean that str % seq is one
> behaviour, str % dict is another, and there should be a str % iter,
> probably consuming items from the iterator up to the number of
> arguments of the format string?

The only argument I see against this is that it could break existing code
of the form '%r' % some_object, where some_object could easily be an
iterable object (say, a numarray array).  Of course, limiting it to only
generators rather than iterators in general would fix this, but then the
benefit gained seems too small to justify the cost of implementing another
exception to the rule.