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authorRaymond Hettinger <python@rcn.com>2010-10-31 21:23:24 (GMT)
committerRaymond Hettinger <python@rcn.com>2010-10-31 21:23:24 (GMT)
commitb373799e0583f368a1736ac9cd02011ba6725bcb (patch)
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parent87298c4a237f2735d232f6e50f299c3a4dc686ec (diff)
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Issue 7447: Improve docs for sum().
Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/library')
-rw-r--r--Doc/library/functions.rst9
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/library/functions.rst b/Doc/library/functions.rst
index de99bbf..1b85d69 100644
--- a/Doc/library/functions.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/functions.rst
@@ -1115,10 +1115,13 @@ are always available. They are listed here in alphabetical order.
Sums *start* and the items of an *iterable* from left to right and returns the
total. *start* defaults to ``0``. The *iterable*'s items are normally numbers,
- and are not allowed to be strings. The fast, correct way to concatenate a
- sequence of strings is by calling ``''.join(sequence)``. To add floating
- point values with extended precision, see :func:`math.fsum`\.
+ and the start value is not allowed to be a string.
+ For some use cases, there a good alternatives to :func:`sum`.
+ The preferred, fast way to concatenate a sequence of strings is by calling
+ ``''.join(sequence)``. To add floating point values with extended precision,
+ see :func:`math.fsum`\. To concatenate a series of iterables, consider using
+ :func:`itertools.chain`.
.. function:: super([type[, object-or-type]])