invert or reverse a string... warning this is a rant

[skip at pobox.com]

    James> I guess while I'm at it, this thread wouldn't have so much steam
    James> were these idioms seemingly unpythonic:

    James>        "".join(reverse(x))
    James>        alist[::-1]

    James> The latter, while more terse than alist.reversed(), is unnatural
    James> and ugly compared to the general elegance of other constructs in
    James> python.  Were this not the case, beginners and intermediate
    James> programmers alike would not have such trouble remembering it.

I've no comment one way or the other on the "".join() idiom.  I realize a
lot of folks don't like it.  The extended slice notation comes from the
numeric community though where they are probably all former FORTRAN
programmers.  I think the concept of start, stop, step (or stride?) is
pretty common there.  It also fairly nicely matches the arguments to range()
and extends the list "copy operator" alist[:] in a more-or-less
straightforward fashion.  It takes a little getting used to, but it's really
not all that hard to remember once you've seen it a couple times.  Besides,
it's not obvious to me that simple sequence slicing would be all that
familiar to the uninitiated.

go-bruins-ly, y'rs,

Skip