I agree with most of the article you link, but there's one thing I don't understand: The article quickly dismisses the obvious fix for recursive iterability, to

I agree with most of the article you link, but there's one thing I don't understand: The article quickly dismisses the obvious fix for recursive iterability, to make strings be composed of "characters": > And an obvious "fix" for this is worse than the original problem: Common Lisp says that strings are composed of characters, a totally different type, which doesn't implement the same methods and has to be handled specially. It's really annoying. It seems to me this contradicts most of what the article says. Sure, strings are rarely collections, so they should not be iterable by default. But the final solution offered admits that sometimes they are, and then you want to be able to iterate over something. For most instances of something, It does not make sense for the individual "elements" to be strings. Bytes are clearly not strings, code points are clearly not strings, grapheme clusters are clearly not strings. Each of those will provide very different methods, because they are very different things. Only after that point (words, sentences, etc.) does the idea of the element being the same type start making sense again. Clearly the concept of a "character" is too ambiguous, and there is no clear "default" for what it should mean, but the idea of a string consisting of some kind of element that is not string appears obviously correct.