For review: PEP 308 - If-then-else expression

[Christian Tismer]

Andrew Dalke wrote:
> Christian Tismer
> 
>>Andrew Koenig:
>>
>>>If I were trying to make code easy to understand for inexperienced
>>>programmers, I would write str.join(',', lines) instead of
>>>','.join(lines).
>>
>>Great idea, IMHO!
> 
> 
> I thought it was kinda neat as well, until I realized
> 
>   str.join(sep, ["A", "B"])
> 
> requires that sep be a byte string.
> 
> 
>>>> str.join(u",", ["A", "B"])
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> TypeError: descriptor 'join' requires a 'str' object but received a
> 'unicode'

The thing is symmetric:
 >>> unicode.join(u" ", ("a","b"))
u'a b'

> Doing
>   sep.join(["A", "B"])
> 
> is better because it doesn't enforce the extra type checking.

It is all, somehow,consequent.
But I guess, the behavior is by chance and not intended.
Unless the class method notation is an artifact,
I think something should be done about it.
Something like a super-string class, which is as
dynamic as the "".join implementation.
ALternatively, it would need to be considered to
revert here and make the class method calling unavailable.

ciao - chris

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