It is curious though that the Python community managed to agree on a single implementation and include that in the standard library
To me, it's more like 2 implementations, overloaded on the same function name. Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Aug 30 2009, 15:41:32) [GCC 2.95.3-haiku-090629] on haiku1 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
import string string.split(' ho ho ') ['ho', 'ho'] string.split(' ho ho ', ' ') ['', 'ho', 'ho', '']
I.e., let the separator parameter default (to whitespace), and you get what we have with Prelude.words, but specify a split character and you get a reversible split. It wasn't a new idea, the Bourne shell for example has a similar dual semantics depending on whether the separator is white space or not. Somehow doesn't seem right for Haskell, though. Donn Cave