string.join() syntax quirky?

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <3BFD49D8.F7A4C6CC at earthlink.net>,
 Erik Johnson <ejohnso9 at earthlink.net> wrote:

>... I have a list of single character strings. A couple of people were
>kind enough to clue me in to the best way to turn this back to a string:
>
>s = "".join(l)
>
>    This works fine, but it seems syntactically backwards to me:
>
># s = l.join("")
>
>makes much more sense to me. The thingy I want to do something to is my
>list. I am just trying to learn Python, so no doubt there will be some
>Python things I will just have to get used to, but is there a logical
>reason why it was implemented as a string method rather than a list
>method? Does it seem backwards to you or does it make intuitive sense to
>you? Comments? (other than of the "it's moot" flavor)

I would also prefer having join be a list method, but there are good 
reasons for the current design.

One way to look at it is that the various collection classes do NOT 
inherit from a single base class (which would be a logical place to 
define a join method). Hence to have all kinds of collections learn to 
"join" requires a lot of repeat coding. Making join a string method 
solves this problem.

-- Russell