Actually the way this entire thing came about what that I wanted
to derive a list of single characters from a string. Of course, I
could write a simple loop but thought that perhaps there might be
an easier way using some library function/method. Is there such
an easier way?
> anomaly for splitfields('',''): in to your previous proposal it should
> return [], but joinfields([], sep ) is ill-defined: the list must have
> at least one element! So an exception seems to be the best solution.
>
OK. I agree with you.
While we are on the topic of infinite loops in library
functions/methods the following will also cause infinite looping:
a = [2, 'abc']
a.append(a)
There are a number of possibilities:
1. let it loop infinitely as it does now
2. allow circularity
3. regard this to be the same as:
a.append(deepcopy(a))
in which case there is no circularity. In this
example we would get:
[2, 'abc', [2, 'abc']]
4. detect circularity and raise an exception
I suppose that there are significant implementation issues here
as well as desirability ones.
Lou Kates, louk@research.teleride.on.ca