Still the __new__ hell ...

[Alex Martelli]

Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:

> In article <1hv8x6v.1x0ceur1nnwi46N%aleax at mac.com>,
> Alex Martelli <aleax at mac.com> wrote:
> >Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> basestring is a *type*.
> >> 
> >>   >>> basestring
> >> <type 'basestring'>
> >> 
> >> It's the base class of which both str and unicode are subclasses.
> >
> >I believe it used to be a tuple back in Python 2.2 (sorry, don't have a
> >Python 2.2 installation to check this right now).
> 
> Python 2.2.2 (#1, Feb 24 2003, 19:13:11)
> [GCC 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-4)] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
> >>> basestring
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> NameError: name 'basestring' is not defined

Thanks for double checking on my vague and apparently incorrect
historical memory!  Obviously I must have been thinking of some _trick_
whereby one bound basestring to the pair to make isinstance on
basestring work in 2.2 much as it did later, rather than an intrinsic
2.2 feature.


Alex