Hey guys, don't get lost in random naming suggestions (cut, snap, part, parts, yada yada yada). Each of those is much less descriptive and provides less differentiation from other string methods. Saving a few characters is not worth introducing ambiguity. Also, the longer name provides a useful visual balance between the three assigned variables and the separator argument. As an extreme example, contrast the following: head, found, tail = s.p(separator) head, found, tail = s.partition(separator) The verb gets lost if it doesn't have visual weight. Also, for those suggesting alternate semantics (raising exceptions when the separator is not found), I challenge you to prove their worth by doing all the code transformations that I did. It is a remarkably informative exercise that quickly reveals that this alternative is dead-on-arrival. For the poster suggesting an optional length argument, I suggest writing out the revised method invariants. I think you'll find that it snarls them into incomprehensibility and makes the tool much more difficult to learn. Also, I recommend scanning my sample library code transformations to see if any of them would benefit from the length argument. I think you'll find that it comes up so infrequently and with such differing needs that it would be a mistake to bake this into the proposal. Raymond