Well, I think if you can live with x = ('foo\n' 'bar\n' 'baz\n' ) I think you could live with x = ('foo\n' + 'bar\n' + 'baz\n' ) as well... (Extra points if you figure out how to have a + on the last line too. :-) So, as I said, it's not the convenience that matters, it's how much it is in use. :-( --Guido On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
On 11 May 2013 04:50, "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 could live with it if we get "dedent()" as a string method. I'd be even happier if constant folding was extended to platform independent method calls on literals, but I don't believe there's a sane way to maintain the "platform independent" constraint.
OTOH, it's almost on the scale of "remove string mod formatting". Shipping at least a basic linting tool in the stdlib would probably be almost as effective and substantially less disruptive. lib2to3 should provide some decent infrastructure for that.
Cheers, Nick.
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)