> In my mind this is a holdover from when Python was much more procedural/C-like That never existed. Or if it did, it was long before any trace exists, and the

> In my mind this is a holdover from when Python was much more procedural/C-like That never existed. Or if it did, it was long before any trace exists, and there's trace from quite a way back when e.g. the first commit in which I can find the len() builtin (https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/c636014c430620325f8d213e9ba10d925991b8d7 https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/c636014c430620325f8...) also has calls to file.read and list.append, and the first python-level methods are created just a few commits later (https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/336f2816cd3599b0347a7fe35d1286d9e38596a0 https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/336f2816cd3599b0347...). Though there may be missing commits, this is 30 in, back when Python was an internal CWI thing (although nearly a year in, according to the official timelines of the early days). This was years before magic methods were even added (https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/04691fc1c1bb737c0db772f5c1ea697a351a01d9 https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/04691fc1c1bb737c0db...). So no, I don't think it's a "holdover from" anything. Rather seems like it's GvR's sensibilities.