Override built in types... possible? or proposal.

[Dan Strohl]

Is it possible to override the assignment of built in types to the shorthand representations?   And if not, is it a reasonable thought to consider adding?

For example, right now, if I do:

test = "this is a string",

I get back str("this is a string").  What if I want to return this as my_string("this is a string")  (OK, I know I have a recursive issue in my example, but hopefully you get the point).

Or;

Test = ['item1', 'item2', 'item3'] returns a list, what if I want to add functionality to all lists in my module?  (and yes, I know I could simply not do [] and always do my_list('item1', 'item2', 'item3']

I am envisioning something in the header like an import statement where I could do;

override str=my_string
override list=my_list

This would only be scoped to the current module and would not be imported when that module was imported.

Thoughts?

Dan Strohl