[Python-3000] Automatically invoking str() in str.join()

[Barry Warsaw]

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 10:18 -0700, Alex Martelli wrote:

> > ''.join(seq) == join('', seq)
> 
> I think I would prefer a signature of:
>     join(seq, joiner='')

Except that I think it would be a mistake to have that and keep
the .join() method on strings because that would increase the confusion
in the argument order.  For example, Guido pointed out a while ago that
a handy way to remember the argument order in re.search() and friends is
to think about pattern.search(string).  That's a useful symmetry to
keep.

> Rationale: an emptystring joiner is the most frequent cases, but
> several others (space, newline, space-comma, ...) occur often enough
> to be worth allowing the joiner to be optionally specified.

If I look at the ones I write a lot it's emptystring, space, newline,
comma-space and the Unicode versions of them occasionally.  There are
others, but those are probably the majority of them.  I'm not sure what
that tells us, except that I don't think there's an obvious default.
You could probably argue for the emptystring just as well as for the
space.

-Barry

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