tuples, index method, Python's design

[Steve Holden]

Antoon Pardon wrote:
> On 2007-04-11, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> "BJrn Lindqvist" <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:740c3aec0704100824m132c45fbi5c4c3ec0c0fa3a67 at mail.gmail.com...
>> On 4/10/07, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
>>> One might perversely allow extension to lists and tuples to allow
>>>
>>>    [3, 4] in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
>>>
>>> to succeed, but that's forcing the use case beyond normal limits.
>> I'd love to have that! There are at least one million use cases for
>> finding a sequence in a sequence and implementing it yourself is
>> non-trivial. Plus then both list and tuple's index methods would work
>> *exactly* like string's. It would be easier to document and more
>> useful. A big win.
>>
>> =======================
>> It would be ambiguous: [3,4] in [[1,2], [3,4], [5,6]] is True now.
>>
>> Strings are special in that s[i] can only be a (sub)string of length 1.
>> 'b' in 'abc' is True.  This makes looking for longer substrings easy.
>>
>> However, [2] in [1,2,3] is False.  IE, list[i] is not normally a list.  So 
>> looking for sublists is different from looking for items.
> 
> Well I think this illustrates nicely what can happen if you design by
> use cases.
> 
> Let us assume for a moment that finding out if one list is a sublist of
> a second list gets considered something usefull enough to be included
> in Python. Now the in operator can't be used for this because it
> would create ambiguities. So it would become either a new operator
> or a new method. But whatever the solution it would be different
> from the string solution.
> 
That's because strings are different from other sequences. See below.

> Now if someone would have thought about how "st1 in st2" would
> generalize to other sequemce if st1 contained more than one
> character they probably would have found the possible inconsistency
> that could create and though about using an other way than using
> the in-operator for this with strings. A way that wouldn't create
> ambiguities when it was considered to be extended to other sequences.
> 
The fact is that strings are the only sequences composed of subsequences 
of length 1 - in other words the only sequences where type(s) == 
type(s[0:1]) is an invariant condition.

This was discussed (at my instigation, IIRC) on python-dev when Python 
(2.4?) adopted the enhanced semantics for "in" on strings - formerly 
only tests for single characters were allowed - but wasn't thought 
significant enough to deny what was felt to be a "natural" usage for 
strings only.

regards
  Steve
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