restriction on sum: intentional bug?

[Terry Reedy]

Alan G Isaac wrote:
> On 10/16/2009 8:16 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:
>> The fact that two or three people who agree on something agree on the
>> thing that they agree on confirms nothing.

If you disagree with this, I think *you* are being silly.

 >> One could just as well argue
>> that summing anything but numbers is semantically incoherent, not
>> correct.  Certainly, my dictionary points in that direction.

Ditto.

> Come on now, that is just a silly argument.

And I think this is a silly response ;-).

> And dictionaries are obviously irrelevant;

Not when talking about the semantics of English words.

> The only serious reason that has been offered
> for the current behavior is that people who do
> not know better will sum strings instead of
> joining them, which is more efficient.  That is
> a pretty weak argument for breaking expectations
> and so refusing to do duck typing that an error
> is raise. Especially in a language like Python.
> (As Tim and Peter make clear.)

The absence of other responses is not the same as the absence of other 
possible responses. Some people have better things to do than rehash all 
the details of a past discussion.

Nothing I have said bears on whether I would have voted for or against 
the current behavior. I have only addressed your to-me silly claim to 
have 'confirmed' the correctness of one position.

Terry Jan Reedy