String.join revisited (URGENT for 1.6)

[Fredrik Lundh]

Greg Ewing wrote:
> So what? It's also been pointed out that it's quite feasible
> to define a join that makes sense for more than just strings,
> and that string joining can be efficiently accommodated as a 
> special case.

that's really a different topic.

> I think that a suitably generalised join should be a builtin, 
> like map and reduce.

your "generalized join" is someone else's "crippled reduce"

(and be careful with overgeneralizations: neither "joining
numbers" nor "reducing strings" make much sense...).

> > or don't -- I'm sure your time could be better spent on hunting down
> > real problems in the 1.6 alphas...
> 
> Bugs can be fixed at any time. But if we don't speak up soon
> before what we see as a serious aesthetic mistake becomes
> entrenched, it will be too late.

if you think that keeping string.join in there is the most serious
design mistake in 1.6, you may be in for some really interesting
surprises...

</F>