The REALLY bad thing about Python lists ..

[Gordon McMillan]

Grant Griffin <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote:

>...  I have never seen a
>Windows equivalent of "tar" (that is, a packager, less 
compression),

Sure you have. Zip with compression level 0 (also known as a jar 
file).

>...: if you're packaging, you might as well compress;
>if you're doing both, they might as well both be in the same 
program.

You might as well ask why the Windows way does it backwards: 
zipping a tar will almost always yield better compression than 
tarring a bunch of zips (more redundancy to work with). (Yes, it's 
easier to extract one file from the latter, but that's not the common 
usage.)