Ezio Melotti <ezio.melo...@gmail.com> added the comment:

I find this wording a little confusing: "For lists, sets, and dicts, methods 
that change the contents or order never return the instance. Instead, they 
return an item from the instance or, more commonly, None.".
I would suggest to drop the second part because we don't care about those 
methods now and because some of them return None too, and simply use "Methods 
that mutate the object never return the instance.", possibly adding something 
like "to remind you that no new objects have been created.".
The same wording can be used in both the Tutorial and the Library Manual (if 
readers happen to read it twice, it's even more likely that they will remember 
it).

FWIW the glossary has entries for "mutable" and "immutable", adding a note 
about this convention in the "mutable" entry might be a good idea too.

Adding the '-> None' in the docstring is fine too, I'm not sure about the 
footnote.

Terry, do you want to work on a patch?

----------
keywords: +easy
nosy: +ezio.melotti
stage:  -> needs patch

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