On 10.05.2013 21:16, Antoine Pitrou 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.
However, in your case, foo('a' 'b') could raise a SyntaxWarning, since the "continuation" is on the same line.
Nice idea. I mostly use this feature when writing multi-line or too-long-to-fit-on- one-editor-line string literals: s = ('abc\n' 'def\n' 'ghi\n') t = ('some long paragraph spanning multiple lines in an editor, ' 'without newlines') This looks and works much better than triple-quoted string literals, esp. when defining such string literals in indented code. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, May 10 2013)
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