I would like to point out another use case of triple quotes outside of docstrings. We do a lot of SQL here and so doing a parameterized query like: """SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE baz = %s""" is a whole lot cleaner and more natural than ("SELECT foo" + "FROM bar" + "WHERE baz = %s") For this toy example, one could just put it all on one line, but for rather more complicated SQL, it becomes a readability (and thus maintainability) factor to preserve SQL's one keyword per line formatting. So, yes, all of our SQL statements wind up in the parse tree and that's not optimal, but the suboptimality there is less for us than the suboptimality of the second form above. I would welcome a multiline comment format that didn't involve docstrings. Best, coyot