Problem statement and current scipy behavior

The scipy.spatial.distance.hamming distance metric returns 1.0 for unequal strings but returns the expected values if strings are converted to lists beforehand.

The following code shows the output generated by the current version of scipy. Note the difference between the distance which is expected to be 0.25 for the chosen strings.

from scipy.spatial import distance
>>> distance.hamming("same", "tame")
1.0
>>> distance.hamming(list("same"), list("tame"))
0.25

Desired behavior

from scipy.spatial import distance
>>> distance.hamming("same", "tame")
0.25