String.join revisited (URGENT for 1.6)

[Johann Hibschman]

Terry Reedy writes:

> Unlike some others, I am comfortable enough with
> joinstring.join(stringseq).  I see 'join' is a message to joinstring to
> join up the items in stringseq (currently, a tuple or list) with itself and
> return the result as one string.

Actually, it sounds more and more to me like 'join' should just be
left as a function, and not made a method at all.  Is there any good
argument that it should be a method?  The only one I can think of is
that a user can define a UserString class which could implement it.

Now if python had CLOS-like generic functions, we could have the cake
and eat it too, allowing us to define our own join-functions to extend
the existing one.  But that's another story...  ;-)

--Johann

-- 
Johann Hibschman                           johann at physics.berkeley.edu