I come to praise .join, not to bury it...

[Greg Ewing]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> 
> I have not heard ANY _technical_ arguments opposed to
> this last time the discussion went around -- nothing but
> vague aesthetic, "it should be the other way", "I find it
> ugly" kind of complaints.

While your arguments are _technically_ sound, we are yet
to be convinced that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks
of being forced to use what many find to be an obscure and 
hard-to-follow syntax for all string joining.

The vast majority of string-joining operations in Python
code that I've seen and written haven't had any need for
polymorphism at all. On the rare occasions when I want a
polymorphic joiner[1], I'm quite willing to build the
necessary machinery and use whatever syntax is necessary.
But I don't want to pay the price of having to use that
syntax *every* time I join strings!

Footnotes:
[1] So rare, in fact, that so far I've *never* wanted one.
    (Although I *have* written functions to do the join-the-
    last-pair-with-something-different thing, I've never had
    to choose between the two polymorphically.)

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg