On Oct 2, 2009, at 2:56 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
Do the users get any say in this? I imagine that some people are heavily invested in %-formatting.
Because there has been limited uptake on {}-formatting (afaict), we still have limited experience with knowing that it is actually better, less error-prone, easier to learn/rember, etc. Outside a handful of people on this list, I have yet to see anyone adopt it as the preferred syntax.
Well, I actually think it was a pretty bad idea to introduce {} formatting, because %-formatting is well-known in many other languages, and $-formatting is used by basically all the rest. So the introduction of {}-formatting has always seemed silly to me, and I wish it had not happened. HOWEVER, much worse than having a new, different, and strange formatting convention is having *multiple* formatting conventions arbitrarily used in different places within the language, with no rhyme or reason. So, given that brace-formatting was added, and that it's been declared the way forward, I'd *greatly* prefer it taking over everywhere in python, instead of having to use a mixture. James