itertools to iter transition (WAS: Pre-PEP: Dictionary accumulatormethods)

[Greg Ewing]

I'd argue that for the same reasons that
dict.fromkeys is a dict classmethod, the itertools methods could be iter
classmethods (or staticmethods). The basic idea being that it's nice to
place the methods associated with a type in that type's definiton. The
parallel's a little weaker here because calling iter doesn't always
produce objects of type iter:

Indeed, I see iter() as being more like len(), which
is clearly a function, not a constructor. Making iter()
a type and giving it class methods would be strange.

 

[Greg Ewing]

The issue that really bothers me here is bloating the builtin
space. We already have an uncomfortable amount of builtin
functions.

Maybe what we're really after here is the notion of a
builtin module that's pre-imported into the builtin
namespace.