[Python-ideas] This seems like a wart to me...

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Adam Olsen writes:

 >  I could easily spend half an hour trying random permutations of a
 > pattern before I figure out why the original didn't work... and I've
 > had a moderate amount of experience.

It takes a moderate amount of experience to get that far, though.  In
particular, in this case, all you need to understand is "[abc]"
matches any of the characters "a", "b", or "c", and *that* is familiar
to anybody who has used a decent shell (any Unix shell, and I believe
4DOS and friends provided it too but I haven't used them for 20 years).

So I don't think that lack of diagnostics explains widespread reluctance
to even substitute ".*" for "*", but instead propose something as ugly
as .split(list("abc")).