"Steven Bethard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > True it's not a huge win. But I'd argue that for the same reasons that > dict.fromkeys is a dict classmethod, the itertools methods could be iter > classmethods (or staticmethods).
As near as I could tell from the doc, .fromkeys is the only dict method that is a classmethod (better, typemethod) rather than an instance method. And all list methods are instance methods. And I believe the same is true of all number operations (and the corresponding special methods). So .fromkeys seems to be an anomaly. I believe the reason for its existence is that the signature for dict() itself was already pretty well 'used up' and Guido preferred to add an alternate constructor as a method rather than further complicate the signature of dict() by adding a fromkeys flag to signal an alternate interpretation of the first and possibly the second parameter. Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
