why no 'length' method in sequences ?

[Just van Rossum]

In article <E4Iv8.2972$8D3.78501 at news1.tin.it>,
 Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote:

> Everything IS "consistently object-oriented" -- polymorphism is the
> principal magic of object-orientedness.  There would be substantial
> loss of power without measurable conceptual simplification if Python
> had no methods (how would I store a bound-method just as any
> other callable then?) or if it had no functions (serious polymorphism
> loss).

I appreciate and agree with what you write, and I like how Python does 
things, too, BUT I can totally see why people find it strange that to 
get the length of an object you write

    len(o)

and to get (eg.) the keys from a dictionary you do

    o.keys()

This seems quite arbitrary, even to me, after maybe 6 years of working 
with Python. If o.__len__() were spelled o.len(), we could easily do 
without the len() builtin. (Note that I don't argue we could do without 
functions: I wouldn't want to miss them for the world...)

Just