Guido van Rossum wrote:
Again, I wasn't considering getting rid of old builtins. We're going to be adding new methods to all of the types anyway (since they'll derive from object), so I was just suggesting that len or length be an alias for __len__.
Hm, but this would violate TOOWTDI.
I am not an OO zealot but I am a consistency zealot. Calling a function that just turns around and calls a method is somewhat confusing and increasingly out of step with all of the other languages that support OO. I would appreciate if you could put this on the long-term fixes list and then you could choose an appropriate time when the howls of pain would be subdued. It really isn't in the same class as the division change because it is easy to interpret old code in the old way. We could support the "preferred syntax" and the "legacy syntax" indefinitely and there would still only one RIGHT way to do it. (just like you could still throw strings as exceptions but you aren't supposed to...) -- Take a recipe. Leave a recipe. Python Cookbook! http://www.ActiveState.com/pythoncookbook