Why does Python use methods sometimes and functions others?

This is a very intersting topic and Guido has made some very valid points:

Why does Python use methods for some functionality (e.g. list.index()) but functions for other (e.g. len(list))?

Guido from effbot.org explains:

There are two bits of “Python rationale” that I’d like to explain first.

First of all, I chose len(x) over x.len() for HCI reasons (def __len__() came much later). There are two intertwined reasons actually, both HCI:

(a) For some operations, prefix notation just reads better than postfix — prefix (and infix!) operations have a long tradition in mathematics which likes notations where the visuals help the mathematician thinking about a problem. Compare the easy with which we rewrite a formula like x*(a+b)into x*a + x*b to the clumsiness of doing the same thing using a raw OO notation.

(b) When I read code that says len(x) I know that it is asking for the length of something. This tells me two things: the result is an integer, and the argument is some kind of container. To the contrary, when I read x.len(), I have to already know that x is some kind of container implementing an interface or inheriting from a class that has a standard len(). Witness the confusion we occasionally have when a class that is not implementing a mapping has a get() or keys() method, or something that isn’t a file has a write() method.

Saying the same thing in another way, I see ‘len‘ as a built-in operation. I’d hate to lose that. /…/

The second bit of Python rationale I promised to explain is the reason why I chose special methods to look __special__ and not merely special. I was anticipating lots of operations that classes might want to override, some standard (e.g. __add__ or __getitem__), some not so standard (e.g.pickle‘s __reduce__ for a long time had no support in C code at all). I didn’t want these special operations to use ordinary method names, because then pre-existing classes, or classes written by users without an encyclopedic memory for all the special methods, would be liable to accidentally define operations they didn’t mean to implement, with possibly disastrous consequences.

Also note that many functions are defined in terms of informal interfaces; for example, reversed works on anything that supports random access to items and has a known length. In practice, implementing things like maxsummap,anyin and others, as built-in functions and operators is actually less code than implementing them as methods for each and every type that needs to support them.

It’s also convenient to have a function that can readily be applied to an amorphous collection of objects when you use list comprehensions and the functional features of Python...

 

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