On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Eric V. Smith <eric@trueblade.com> wrote:

I think it has to do with the nature of the programs that people write.
I write software for internal use in a large company. In the last 13
years there, I've written literally hundreds of individual programs,
large and small. I just checked: literally 100% of my calls to
%-formatting (older code) or str.format (in newer code) could be
replaced with f-strings. And I think every such use would be an improvement.

I'm sure that pretty darn close to 100% of all the uses of %-formatting and str.format I've written in the last 13 years COULD be replaced by the proposed f-strings (I suppose about 16 years for me, actually). But I think that every single such replacement would make the programs worse. I'm not sure if it helps to mention that I *did* actually "write the book" on _Text Processing in Python_ :-).

The proposal just continues to seem far too magical to me. In the training I now do for Continuum Analytics (I'm in charge of the training program with one other person), I specifically have a (very) little bit of the lessons where I mention something like:

print("{foo} is {bar}".format(**locals()))

But I give that entirely as a negative example of abusing code and introducing fragility. f-strings are really the same thing, only even more error-prone and easier to get wrong. Relying on implicit context of the runtime state of variables that are merely in scope feels very break-y to me still. If I had to teach f-strings in the future, I'd teach it as a Python wart.

That said, there *is* one small corner where I believe f-strings add something helpful to the language. There is no really concise way to spell:

collections.ChainMap(locals(), globals(), __builtins__.__dict__).

If we could spell that as, say `lgb()`, that would let str.format() or %-formatting pick up the full "what's in scope". To my mind, that's the only good thing about the f-string idea.

Yours, David...

Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food
from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the
uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting
advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is
to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.