[Python-3000] Making strings non-iterable

[Guido van Rossum]

On 4/16/06, Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 16, 2006, Greg Ewing wrote:
> > Jim Jewett wrote:
> >>
> >> (I wouldn't want to give up slicing, though, which might make the
> >> no-iteration trickier.)
> >
> > You'd want to allow slicing but not indexing -- i.e.
> > s[i:j] is okay but not s[i].

(I'm surprised by this. Why would s[i] be wrong?)

> Ewww.  I've been getting steadily less comfortable with this idea,
> despite the fact that I've been bitten a few times by iterating over
> strings.  This, however, is enough to make me a firm thumbs-down on the
> idea: I think it is gratuitous code breakage.  I think it is perfectly
> reasonable to want to look at a single character of a string.

I think you may be right. I implemented this (it was really simple to
do) but then found I had to fix tons of places that iterate over
strings. For example:

- The sre parser and compiler use things like set("0123456789") and
also iterate over the characters of the input regexp to parse it.

- difflib has an API defined for either two lists of strings (a
typical line-by-line diff of a file), or two strings (a typical
intra-line diff), or even two lists of anything (for a generalized
sequence diff).

- small changes in optparse.py, textwrap.py, string.py.

And I'm not even at the point where the regrtest.py framework even
works (due to the difflib problem).

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)