<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Nov 6, 2011, at 12:49 AM, Petri Lehtinen wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; ">Currently, find(), rfind(), index(), rindex(), count(), startswith()<br>and endswith() of str, bytes and bytearray accept None. Should<br>list.index() and tuple.index() accept it, too?</span></blockquote></div><br><div>The string methods accept None as a historical artifact</div><div>of being in string.py where optional arguments defaulted to None.</div><div>That doesn't imply that you should change every other API that</div><div>accepts a start argument.</div><div><br></div><div>The list.index() API is ancient and stable. There has been little or</div><div>no demonstrated need for its start argument to be None.</div><div><br></div><div>Also, the list API does not exist in isolation. It shows up in</div><div>strings, the sequence ABC, and every API that aspires to</div><div>be list-like. </div><div><br></div><div>Overall, I'm -1 on this change and find it to be gratuitous.</div><div>We have *way* to many micro API changes of dubious benefit.</div><div><br></div><div>Also, the change should not have been applied to Py2.7 and Py3.2.</div><div>We don't backport API changes. That would just make Jython</div><div>and IronPython become non-compliant in mid-stream.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Raymond</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></body></html>