could sum be faster on lists

Question

This is somehow a follow-up to this question

So first, you\'ll notice that you cannot perform a sum on a list of strings to concatenate them, python tel

Answer 1

FWIW, we can trick the interpreter into letting us use sum on strings by passing an appropriate custom class instance as the start arg to sum.

class Q(object):
    def __init__(self, data=''):
        self.data = str(data)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.data

    def __add__(self, other):
        return Q(self.data + str(other))

print(sum(['abc', 'def', 'ghi'], Q()))

output

abcdefghi

Of course, this is a rather silly thing to do. :)