On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 7:41 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
They clearly should be in different threads. Line continuation is orthogonal to string continuation. You can have string concatenation on a single line:
In theory. In practice, the times when I'm having trouble fitting something onto a single line *and* cannot find a good place to break it (using parens), the problem almost always involves a string. And the number of times I needed to concatenate two strings on the same line (but wasn't willing to use a +) has been ... only when when a seemingly arbitrary syntax restriction requires a literal string -- basically, when writing a docstring.
On 17/05/13 19:32, Christian Tismer wrote:
- continuation of a string on the next line will later enforce the backslash.
I don't understand what this sentence means.
Today, (if you're not writing a docstring) you can write "abcd" "efgh" and it magically turns into "abcdefgh". He proposes that -- eventually -- you would have to write "abcd" \ "efgh" so that the \ would be an explicit indicator that you were continuing the line, and hadn't just forgotten a comma.
-1 since there are uses for concatenating strings on a single line.
I understand "create a string demonstrating all the quoting conventions". I don't understand why an explicit + is so bad in that case. Nor do I understand what would be so horrible about breaking the physical line there. So the only use I know about is docstrings. And maybe that should be fixed there, instead. -jJ