>  were incredulous that such a fundamental thing was missing. But in 
> Smalltalk it's not fundamental - Smalltalk is object-oriented, not 
> string-oriented.
>
> Colin
>
. This implementation of split/join does not operate on strings, it 
operates on collections of objects

. It is no less idiomatic than some of the more esoteric methods in 
collection

. The whole point of putting something like this into the kernel is to 
raise the level of abstraction a bit. In doing so it is totally possible 
that some other code somewhere else can use this more succinct form and 
the net image size is reduced.

For example: notice the tidy use of readable smalltalk and typical 
idioms in NetNameResolver-readDecimalByteFrom: and #addressFromString:

regards

Keith