why no 'length' method in sequences ?

[Terry Reedy]

"Richard Gruet" <rjgruet at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a9nbuq$916$1 at aphrodite.grec.isp.9tel.net...
> I just meant that to my human eyes, it is easier to memorize when
everything
> is consistently object oriented and there are only methods

Would you prefer that a+b be written as a.add(b) (which I believe
would be the Python equivalent of what at least one Object-Oriented
language does)?

> (like in Java - and I prefer Python to Java :-), or the contrary,
only functions.

or as add(a,b) (which is the Python version of what some functional
languages do)?

> Then I
> have not to remember which functions are methods and which ones are
> built-in. I think this is because a mixed model is more complicated
than a
> non-mixed one.

An argument can be made for syntactic uniformity, and successful
languages have been designed around that principle.  However, Python
was not.  As I remember, Guido has expressed a belief that a mixture
of function calls, operators, and method calls is *easier* to read.
And the observation that programmers read code as much or more than
they write it is one of the guiding forces of Python design.

Terry J. Reedy