.title() - annoying mistake

[Robert Latest]

Benjamin Schollnick wrote:
>
>> I agree with everything you say. Especially the open source part. But
>> wouldn't you agree that .title() with all its arbitrary specificity to
>> appear in the very core of a general purpose language is quite an oddity?
>
> No, because it book ends the issue.
>
> Upper - Converts everything to uppercase Lower - Converts everything to
> lowercase
>
> Title - Covers the cases in-between upper/lower.  

My only issue is that I completely fail to see how this function would be
useful enough to warrant the inclusion into the *core* of a general-purpose
language, including its misleading name. The fact that the function's behavior
is correctly documented doesn't make its very existence less bewildering to me.
Consider this function:

def add_seventeen(n): '''Return n with 16.8 added''' return n + 16.8

It's like .title(): It does almost the thing its name suggests, it is correctly
documented, it is useful to anybody who happens to want 16.8 added to numbers,
and it might erroneously be used by someone who wants exactly 17 added and
didn't bother to read the docs.

> And as I mentioned the sheer amount of work that would be needed would
> probably cover a phd dissertation or more…  It’s a huge problem set to
> respect one language, let alone all languages.  

And that's why I believe that such a function should be delegated to a natural
language-processing library and not the core of Python.

> So the only answer is to not respect the languages, and leave that up to a
> later implementation or for someone else to assist in adding in support.

And that too.

> Heck, how do we prevent it from titlecasing abbreviations?  (This is plain
> text not XML….  If it was XML it would be easy!)

And that too.

BTW I have no beef with the person who invented .title() nor with anybody who
uses it. I know that everybody can join the Python development community and
propose the removal of .title() and the inclusion of add_seventeen(). That
said, I doubt that .title() would make it into Python today if it weren't there
already. I'm having fun with this.

robert