what *is* a class?

[holger krekel]

Jeff Epler wrote:
> This is not the Pythonic style.  Even when it would sometimes be
> convenient, methods do not tend to return "self".  That's why these
> don't work:
> 
>     # Iterate the sorted list
>     for item in l.sort(): ...
> 
>     # Create and pack a widget
>     x = Label(text="Wibble").pack()
> 
>     # Dump two objects to a pickle
>     p = pickle.Pickler()
>     p.dump(obj1).dump(obj2)
> 
> One motivation for this is that if list.sort returns None, nobody
> will write
>     for item in l.sort():
> thinking that a copy of l is sorted.  It'll immediately blow up.

I agree that this is a good thing. But it wouldn't hurt to have

    reverse, sort, extend

as standalone functions somewhere in the stdlib.  They would return
a copy, so that you can write:

    # iterate over a sorted copy of a list
    for item in sort(l):
        ...

reverse could probabally be made an iterator so that it gets really
cheap to write:

    for item in reverse(l):
        ...

And i think these functions should work with tuples and strings also.

cheers,

    holger