On Fri, 10 May 2013 12:30:15 -0700 Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
On Fri, 10 May 2013 11:48:51 -0700 Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
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?
I'm rather -1. It's quite convenient and I don't want to add some '+' signs everywhere I use it. I'm sure many people also have long string literals out there and will have to endure the pain of a dull task to "fix" their code.
Fixing this is an easy task for lib2to3 though.
Assuming someone does it :-) You may also have to "fix" other software. For example, I don't know if gettext supports fetching literals from triple-quoted Python strings, while it works with string continuations. As for "+", saying it is a replacement is a bit simplified, because the syntax definition (for method calls) or operator precedence (for e.g. %-formatting) may force you to add parentheses. Regards Antoine.