On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Christian Tismer <tismer@stackless.com>wrote:
The "&" is not a valid operator on strings and looks pretty much like gluing parts together. It is better than the "\" that just escapes the newline and cannot take comments.
I don't like something that is a standard operator becoming special syntax. While it's true that string & string is not valid, it's not the case that string & ... is not valid. I dislike dot for the same reason. It's confusing that these would do different things: 'abc' & 'def' ('abc') & 'def' I like the \ idea because it's clearly syntax and not an operator, but the fact that it doesn't work with comments is annoying since one reason to break a string is to insert comments. I don't like that spaces after the \ are not allowed because trailing spaces are invisible to me but not to the parser. So what if the rule for trailing \ was changed to: The \ continuation character may be followed by white space and a comment. If a comment is present, there must be at least one whitespace character between the \ and the comment. That is: x = [ # THIS WOULD BE ALLOWED 'abc' \ 'def' \ # not the python keyword 'ghi' ] x = [ # THIS WOULD BE AN ERROR 'abc' \ 'def' # a comment but no continuation \ 'ghi' ] One thing I like about using \ is that it already works (aside from my proposed comment change). So anyone wanting to write forward/backward-compatible code can just add the \s now. If you want to start enforcing the restriction, just use from __future__ import explicit_string_continuation. --- Bruce Latest blog post: Alice's Puzzle Page http://www.vroospeak.com Learn how hackers think: http://j.mp/gruyere-security