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Steven D'Aprano writes:
And yet it is indisputable that chained methods are useful even for methods which modify the object they work on. Look at pandas:
Guido disputed that it was useful *enough*. My point was advice to the proponent to get his proposal adopted (despite the fact that I personall think it's a YAGNI), not a characterization of universal best practice.
2. Is the method chaining syntax preferable to an alternative operator?
What do you mean, a different operator? Are you suggesting we should have two operators for method lookups?
No, I'm suggesting that pipelines could have an alternative syntax using a different operator. This probably isn't really feasible since (unless we actually added syntax) it would require some sort of contortion or additional boilerplate to handle non-iterator arguments.
a. is obviously impossible, since strings already support method chaining,
The OP wasn't talking about general method chaining, and neither was I.