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

[Fredrik Lundh]

Thomas Wouters wrote:

> > can anyone point to one other example where "call method on
> > literal" is used in Python ?
>
> It doesn't matter.

it doesn't matter to you when the preferred way to do things don't look
like Python code?

> Either case is confusing, one way or another, as Tim has
> already argued.

this far, people have argued that it's confusing when methods have more
than one argument (which is pure rubbish), and that people seem to recall
that this was a common issue on comp.lang.python (it wasn't; especially
not compared to the amount of "how do I join things" posts we're seeing
these days and the amount of "eww. that's ugly" I hear when teaching
Python...).

you're also forgetting that I wrote the Unicode type, and was among the
first persons to bring up the "how the heck do we handle join" issue.
there's no frigging way anyone can convince me that the current design
is the result of a careful design process; the whole argument went "we
need an implementation hook anyway, so we might as well expose it".

if you think that's a good design guideline, please explain why we shouldn't
remove "len", "getattr", "int/float/complex/str/repr" (as converters), and a ton
of other things from the language.  after all, isn't obj.__getattr__(name) a lot
less error-prone than getattr(obj, name) ?

> Changing it would be a big mistake.

nonsense.  keeping a design mistake is a big mistake.  fixing a design mistake
is a good thing, and it'll make Python a nicer language.

</F>