2013/5/10 Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org>
I just spent a few minutes staring at a bug caused by a missing comma -- I got a mysterious argument count error because instead of foo('a', 'b') I had written foo('a' 'b').
This is a fairly common mistake, and IIRC at Google we even had a lint rule against this (there was also a Python dialect used for some specific purpose where this was explicitly forbidden).
Now, with modern compiler technology, we can (and in fact do) evaluate compile-time string literal concatenation with the '+' operator, so there's really no reason to support 'a' 'b' any more. (The reason was always rather flimsy; I copied it from C but the reason why it's needed there doesn't really apply to Python, as it is mostly useful inside macros.)
Would it be reasonable to start deprecating this and eventually remove it from the language?
From my perspective as a Python user (not knowing anything about the ramifications for the required changes to the parser, etc.) it is very reasonable. This bug is very hard to spot when it happens, and an argument count error is really one of the more benign forms it can take.
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