[Python-Dev] Death to string functions!

[Christopher Petrilli]

So I was thinking about this whole thing, and wondering why it was
that seeing things like:

     " ".join(aList)

bugged me to no end, while:

     aString.lower()

didn't seem to look wrong. I finally put my finger on it, and I
haven't seen anyone mention it, so I guess I'll do so.  To me, the
concept of "join" on a string is just not quite kosher, instead it
should be something like this:

     aList.join(" ")

or if you want it without the indirection:

     ['item', 'item', 'item'].join(" ")

Now *THAT* looks right to me.  The example of a join method on a
string just doesn't quite gel in my head, and I did some thinking and
digging, and well, when I pulled up my Smalltalk browser, things like
join are done on Collections, not on Strings.  You're joining the
collection, not the string.

Perhaps in a rush to move some things that were "string related" in
the string module into methods on the strings themselves (something I
whole-heartedly support), we moved a few too many things
there---things that symantically don't really belong as methods on a
string object.

How this gets resolved, I don't know... but I know a lot of people
have looked at the string methods---and they each keep coming back to
1 or 2 that bug them... and I think it's those that really aren't
methods of a string, but instead something that operates with strings, 
but expects other things.

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli@amber.org