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A comment on Haskell People. Parent comment

Re:Haskell People by vostok on Saturday September 30, 2017 @02:07PM (#15374141)
> But, as another practical example: "sum" in Python works for numbers, but I've seen folks assume that it works for anything that you can use + on, and so try and use strings with it.

I don't know python very well, but aren't string special cased? It does work with lists.

    sum([[1,2,3],[4,5,6]], [])
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Re:Haskell People by nine_k on Sunday October 01, 2017 @10:11AM (#15377903)
It does if you specify a sequence of list as the first argument, and an empty list as an initial value.
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Re:Haskell People by vostok on Sunday October 01, 2017 @02:23PM (#15379087)
This is because the start argument defaults to 0. It doesn't make sense to add a list and 0.

The same thing does not work for a sequence of strings and an empty string.

    sum(["abc","def"], "")
Throws TypeError: sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]
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