Why can't I xor strings?

[dataangel]

Phil Frost wrote:

>^ is the bitwise xor operator. Performing bitwise operations on strings
>doesn't make much sense, so it's invalid. You can define a logical xor
>function like so:
>
>xor = lambda p, q: (p and not q) or (not p and q)
>
>or equivalently:
>
>xor = lambda p, q: bool(p) != bool(q)
>
>On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 04:19:22PM -0400, dataangel wrote:
>  
>
>>I wrote a function to compare whether two strings are "similar" because 
>>I'm using python to make a small text adventure engine and I want to it 
>>to be responsive to slight mispellings, like "inevtory" and the like. To 
>>save time the first thing my function does is check if I'm comparing an 
>>empty vs. a non-empty string, because they are to be never considered 
>>similar. Right now I have to write out the check like this:
>>
>>   if str1 and str2:
>>       if not str1 or not str2:
>>           return 0
>>
>>Because python won't let me do str1 ^ str2. Why does this only work for 
>>numbers? Just treat empty strings as 0 and nonempty as 1.
>>
>>Regardless of whether this is the best implementation for detecting if 
>>two strings are similar, I don't see why xor for strings shouldn't be 
>>supported. Am I missing something? Inparticular, I think it'd be cool to 
>>have "xor" as opposed to "^". The carrot would return the resulting 
>>value, while "xor" would act like and/or do and return the one that was 
>>true (if any).
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
Nice =D

But why no xor builtin? :P