Python strings are no sequences

I have a strong C / C++ background. Thus, a “string” for me is a sequence of characters. Normally, there are operations to access an individual element of such a sequence. For C strings, that’s str[i] which is just a nice way to hide pointer arithmetic (str + i and i + str and also i[str] are equivalent ways of saying the same thing). In C++, there’s an operator[].

The semantic I expect from these operations - get an individual element of a sequence - could be expressed by the following Haskell type signature:

getSomeElement :: [a] -> a

In natural language: Given a sequence of things of type a, when accessing an individual element, we get a thing of type a.

Fair enough.

Python also has “sequence-like” data types. Lists. Tuples.

l = [1, 2, 3, 4] # a list of integers
l[1] # gives 2, an integer

t = (5, 6, 7, 8) # a tuple with integers
t[2] # gives 7, an integer

But strings are different:

s = "help"
type(s) # <class 'str'> ... seems legit
s[0] # "h" ... huh? Isn't this ...
type(s[0]) # <class 'str'> ... a STRING, too?!?!

Does this hurt in practice? I doubt it. But I stumbled over it when I tested the prototype of an algorithm I wrote: Initially, I was only using strings as test input. The algorithm uses expressions like data[index] a lot - which in the case of strings returns new strings of length one. Thus, calling len(data[index]) was returning 1. When I changed the input to lists of integers, len(data[index]) was then of course failing. I had to rewrite each data[index] into data[index:index + 1].