Methods vs. Functions (Re: [Python-Dev] A house upon the sand)

[Guido van Rossum]

> join() is special indeed, but what about the semantics we talked
> about last year (?)...
> 
> join(seq, sep) := seq[0] + sep + seq[1] + sep + ... + seq[n]
> 
> This should fit all uses of join() (accept maybe os.path.join).

This is much more general than the current definition --
e.g. join(range(5), 0) would yield 10.  I'm not too keen on widening
the definition this much.

> How about naming the beast concat() with sep defaulting to '' to
> avoid the problems with os.path.join() ?!

Hm... if we can stick to the string semantics this would be okay.  But
we'd lose the symmetry of split/join.  Note that string.join has a
default separator of ' ' to roughly match the default behavoir of
split.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)