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

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Aesthetes are a different kind of professional, I'm a design theorist, those
are art wh#$3s ;) .  Sorry, I dislike the connotations of "aesthete" (too
turn of the last century eclecticism for me), so I use aesthetic (which, I
feel, has a much nicer resonance with "ascetic", which is closer to my sense
of beauty).

I have no problem with the semantics of the string having methods.  I asked
for lists and tuples to have a consistent and complete set of methods 2 or 3
years ago if I'm recalling correctly.  Healing the class/type split is
something I would like to live to see (if the PSU doesn't get me first).

I'll have to give that Python thing a try.  Can you recommend any good books
for someone who's been stuck in a backwater language for the last 6 years?
Isn't that Python thing slow though?  I heard they don't even have static
type declarations and they don't support polymorphic function signature
dispatches.

"," . join( ) doesn't help much, as there's no graphical connection drawn
between the two items, so you lose the correspondence of the . character to
"member of" (i.e. the glyph no longer represents the concept, but must be
interpreted at a semantic level to make the construct clear).

As I mentioned, I don't expect this to change, just wanted to point out that
there is a legitimate complaint from an aesthetic standpoint.

Enjoy,
Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Holden [mailto:sholden at holdenweb.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 7:36 PM
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: I come to praise .join, not to bury it...
...
A professional would call themself an aesthete :-)
...
Just the same, a beginner can read the code as "some string's method is
applied to whatever argument is passed" just by knowing the syntax.
...
Well, if you like white space Python should be the perfect language for you!
...
What about the currently syntactically-acceptable

>>> ", " . join(["big", "fat", "joint"])
'big, fat, joint'
>>>

Remember that technically the dot is an operator. Personally I find the
extra whitespace intrusive, but that is a matter of style and taste. Any
better for you?
...
Not a wart, but a consistent application of object-oriented principles.
Sorry. I too wish the world looked more beautiful (to you).
...