[matplotlib-devel] Fwd: A question about cbook.is_string_like

[Nicolas G. <nic...@ga...>]

Thank you John for your answer.

You're right: efficiency is a non-issue. I shouldn't have mentioned it.

On 11/5/06, John Hunter <jdh...@ac...> wrote:
>     Nicolas> But in this function, I don't like the idea to try an
>     Nicolas> operation on a string, and wait for an exception in order
>     Nicolas> to know if we really have a string or not. It's not very
>     Nicolas> efficient, nor very beautiful.
>
>     Nicolas> I guess initial developer did that to keep compatibility
>     Nicolas> with old Python versions.
>
> I did it because it is general, elegant, and efficiency doesn't matter
> here (any string operation is insignificant to the work we do making a
> figure).  What if a user writes their own string class, eg someone
> wants a mutable string, or a lower case string, or any number of
> custom string objects, and these aren't covered by the types module?
>
> We make heavy use of duck typing in matplotlib, and it hasn't caused
> us any problems I know of.
>
> JDH