sum and strings

[Paul Rubin]

Georg Brandl <g.brandl-nospam at gmx.net> writes:
> Why would you try to sum up strings? Besides, the ''.join idiom is quite
> common in Python.

Just because it's common doesn't mean it's obvious.  In my opinion
it's as ugly as sin, and the fact that it's an idiom shows a
shortcoming in Python.  The obvious reason for summing strings is that
it's a long-established feature of Python that a+b concatenates two
strings, so summing a,b,c,d,e should result in a+b+c+d+e.