itertools to iter transition (WAS: Pre-PEP: Dictionary accumulator methods)

[Greg Ewing]

Steven Bethard wrote:
> I'd argue that for the same reasons that 
> dict.fromkeys is a dict classmethod, the itertools methods could be iter 
> classmethods (or staticmethods).  The basic idea being that it's nice to 
> place the methods associated with a type in that type's definiton.  The 
> parallel's a little weaker here because calling iter doesn't always 
> produce objects of type iter:

Indeed, I see iter() as being more like len(), which
is clearly a function, not a constructor. Making iter()
a type and giving it class methods would be strange.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg