OT Signature quote [was Re: Unrecognized escape sequences in string literals]

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:01:43 -0700, Douglas Alan wrote:

> P.S. I find it strange, however, that anyone who is not okay with
> "abusing" operator overloading in this manner, wouldn't also take
> umbrage at Python's overloading of "+" to work with strings and lists,
> etc. Numerical addition and sequence concatenation have entirely
> different semantics.

Not to English speakers, where we frequently use 'add' to mean 
concatenate, append, insert, etc.:

"add this to the end of the list"
"add the prefix 'un-' to the beginning of the word to negate it"
"add your voice to the list of those calling for change"
"add your name and address to the visitor's book"

and even in-place modifications:

"after test audiences' luke-warm response, the studio added a completely 
different ending to the movie".


Personally, I would have preferred & for string and list concatenation, 
but that's entirely for subjective reasons.


-- 
Steven