[Python-3000] Automatically invoking str() in str.join() (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Fri Apr 28 05:41:01 CEST 2006

On 4/27/06, Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:

[Fredrik Lundh] > no, because people enjoy writing readable code. doing things by exe- > cuting methods attached to literals isn't very readable, and isn't used > for anything else.

As Barry often says, he spells it TAB.join() or BLANK.join() (etc) instead. That's very readable. > I don't think anyone on this list can take the "but if there's more than > one argument, I am going to be confused" argument seriously. Then you don't remember that the order of arguments here was a frequent confusion in the old days. If you like a callable with separator first, you can also do join = str.join today, and if you like a callable with separator second, you can also do from string import join today. My bet is that nobody here uses either, because they don't really find the method spelling distasteful enough to endure the one-line bother to set up an alternative that would flood their soul with joy ;-)

Right, but I am thinking of the newbies for this. I remember when I learned Python and I thought the way str.join() worked was weird (and I still do, although I understand why it how it is). Granted we could just let string concatenation through '+' be more prominent, but we all know the performance issues of looping through an iterator to concatenate strings.

If you want a builtin instead in Py3K, I'm just -0 on that (but -1 if that's in addition to the three spellings Python already has).

I wouldn't want it added without ditching the other two versions as well. Personally I would be fine if string.join() stayed and we considered removing str.join() and just made the string module more prominent (after removing all the deprecated stuff).

-Brett

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