[Python-ideas] Dunder method to make object str-like

[Chris Barker]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 11:28 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fair enough. That was a spur-of-the-moment thought. To be honest, this
> proposal is a massive generalization from, ultimately, a single
> use-case.


yes, but now that you say:

...


> And this should make it easier for third-party code to be functional
> without even being aware of the Path object. There are two basic
> things that code will be doing with paths: passing them unchanged to
> standard library functions (eg open()), and combining them with
> strings. The first will work by definition; the second will if paths
> can implicitly upcast to strings.
>

so this is really a way to make the whole path!=string thing easier -- we
don't want to simply call str() on anything that might be a path, because
that will work on anything, whether it's the least bit pathlike at all, but
this would introduce a new kind of __str__, so that only things for which
it makes sense would "Just work":

str + something

Would only concatenate to a new string if somethign was an object that
couuld "losslessly" be considered a string?

but if we use the __index__ example, that is specifically "an integer that
can be ued as an index", not "something that can be losslessly converted to
an integer".

so why not the __fspath__ protocol anyway?

Unless there are all sorts of other use cases you have in mind?

-CHB

-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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