Well it is possible in most cases to write Python code to work
irrespective of the actual sequence type used. It takes a little
care, e.g. you must use a[:0] (where a is the argument of unknown
sequence type) instead of an empty value of a specific type.
I don't know if all the code in string.py is correct in this respect;
I suspect not, but most of it will be okay -- on the other hand it is
only intended to work on strings so who cares. I suppose an
appropriate subset of the routines from string.py could be provided as
sequence.py (totally avoiding the "from strop import *" issue).
On the other hand, as I wrote in my previous mail, fixing strop and
other built-in modules to have the same kind of genericity would be
difficult. Strop was designed to implement string manipulations as
fast as possible by exploiting the C representation; perhaps a seqop
module could be written which does somilar things for generic
sequences.
Any volunteers?
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>