On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 3:54 PM Steve Jorgensen <stevej@stevej.name> wrote:
See https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/Syntax/Literals#The_%_Notatio... for what Ruby offers.
For me, the arrays are the most useful aspect.
%w{one two three} => ["one", "two", "three"]
I did a search, and I don't see that this has been suggested before, but I might have missed something. I'm guessing I'm not the first person to ask whether this seems like a desirable feature to add to Python.
I am not seeing the advantage of this. Can you provide some specific examples that you think would benefit from this syntax? For the example you gave, besides saving a few characters I don't see the advantage over the existing way we have to do that: 'one two three'.split() Python usually uses [ ] for list creation or indexing. Co-opting it for a substantially different purpose of string processing like this doesn't strike me as a good idea, especially since we have two string identifiers already, ' and ". Python does have something similar in function although different in syntax, its string prefixes. For example f-strings, r-strings, byte literals, etc. There have been proposals for supporting custom string prefixes, but none have gone anywhere. Other hard-coded string prefixes could, in principle, be done, but a strong case would need to be made for them. If we went with string prefixes, the only one I could see maybe having any traction would be a regex one, but I personally wouldn't see that as being common enough to warrant it. Converting strings to names is something I think should be discouraged rather than encouraged (we have dictionaries to handle arbitrary names), shell commands are complicated enough that I would think having a dedicated function is necessary and I think it would be an abuse of string literals, and the others duplicate features python already has as far as I can tell. So I would be -100 on using [ ] for strings in any way, +0 on a regex string prefix, and -1 on all the other corresponding string prefixes.