[Python-ideas] Add list.join() please

[David Mertz]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2019, 12:22 AM Brendan Barnwell

>  What would you expect to happen with this line:
> >
> > ['foo', b'foo', 37, re.compile('foo')].join('_')
>
>         That problem already exists with str.join though.  It's just
> currently spelled this way:
>
> ','.join(['foo', b'foo', 37, re.compile('foo')])
>
>         . . . and the result is an error.  I don't see how it's
> semantically
> any less sensible to call list.join on a list of non-string things than
> it is to pass a list of non-string things to str.join.


This feels like an important asymmetry to me. There is a difference between
to object itself being the wrong kind of thing and the arguments to a
method being wrong.

In the first case, the object (a heterogenous list) can NEVER support a
.join() method. It's simply the wrong kind of object. Of course, it's right
as far as the basic type system goes, but its deeper (maybe "structural")
type cannot support that method.

On the other hand, sure, almost any function, including methods, will choke
on bad arguments. But no string *object* rules out joining if good
arguments can be found.

I am sure readers will immediately reply, "what about list.sort()?"
Unfortunately, that really will simply fail on lists of the wrong "type."
After all these years, I still think that change in Python 2.3 or so was
the wrong choice (for those with fewer gray hairs: when the hills were
young, Python objects were arbitrarily comparable under inequality, even
when the answer didn't "mean" anything).

I actually agree that a 'cast_to_string_and_join()' function sounds useful.
Of course, you can write one easily enough, it doesn't need to be a method.
For that matter, I think I'd probably rather that str.join() was simply a
function in the string module or somewhere similar, with a signature like
'join(delim, iter_of_strings)'
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