On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 09:06:49AM -0700, Christopher Barker wrote:
As for:
%w[red green blue]
The [] make it pretty clear at a glance that I'm dealing with a list -- but the lack of quotes is really likely to confuse me -- particularly if I have identifiers with similar names!
In another comment, you asserted that we all have editors that help with typing quotes. Don't you have an editor that formats identifiers differently from string literals? I predict that even without colour or stylistic hinting, people will soon get used to the syntax. The fact that space-seperated identifiers are not legal in Python is a pretty huge hint that these aren't identifiers. Virtually overnight, the Python community got used to the opposite change, with f-strings: something that looks like a string is actually code containing identifiers and even arbitrary expressions: f"Your score is {score}" so I don't believe that this will be anywhere near the cognitive load that you state, especially if you are using an editor that displays strings in the different style to identifiers or numbers. -- Steven