automatically mapping builtins (WAS: itertools to iter transition)

[Michael Spencer]

Steven Bethard wrote:
> Michael Spencer wrote:
>  > While we're on the topic, what do you think of having unary,
>  > non-summary builtins automatically map themselves when called with an
>  > iterable that would otherwise be an illegal argument:
> 
> I personally don't much like the idea because I expect 'int' to produce 
> an int, just like I expect 'list' to produce a list.  So having 'int' 
> produce an iterable in any situation seems inappropriate to me.
> 
> [...]
> 
Bengt Richter wrote:
> That last "otherwise" is pretty important for strings as in int('1234')  ;-) 
> 
[snip]
> 
> But wouldn't you really currently write the "->" form from above? I.e.,
> 
>  for ordchar in (ord(c) for c in somestring):
>       ...
>  

Thanks for the reactions, (and test implementation, Bengt)

Something to play with, but the idea doesn't seem like a big win, when the 
explicit genexp is fully general and only slightly more verbose.


Michael