On Sep 29, 9:02 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > George Sakkis: > > > I don't see the same value in creating a distinction between methods > > and builtin functions unless the latter are truly generic (and even > > then I wouldn't mind having them as methods of the base object class, > > e.g. object.type()). Having a builtin len(x) delegate to x.__len__() > > seems harder to justify. > > I have shown few usage examples of the len() one of the posts in this > thread. Can you take a look at them and show how you can better > rewrite them without a len function? > > Bye, > bearophile
You mean this ? >>> seq = ["aaaa", "bb", "c", "ddd"] >>> seq2 = [[1,1,1,1], [2,2], [3], [4,4,4]] >>> sorted(seq, key=lambda x:x.__len__()) ['c', 'bb', 'ddd', 'aaaa'] >>> sorted(seq2, key=lambda x:x.__len__()) [[3], [2, 2], [4, 4, 4], [1, 1, 1, 1]] Sure, "len" looks better than lambda x:x.__len__(), but the same would be true if there was an "upper" builtin for the following example: >>> s = ['a', 'd', 'B', 'C'] >>> s2 = [u'a', u'd', u'B', u'C'] >>> upper = lambda x: x.upper() >>> sorted(s, key=upper) ['a', 'B', 'C', 'd'] >>> sorted(s2, key=upper) [u'a', u'B', u'C', u'd'] No difference in principle, just len() happens to be implemented more often than upper(). George -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
