Hey Bruce! On 16.05.13 19:26, Bruce Leban wrote:
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Christian Tismer <tismer@stackless.com <mailto:tismer@stackless.com>> wrote:
The "&" is not a valid operator on strings and looks pretty much like gluing parts together. It is better than the "\" that just escapes the newline and cannot take comments.
I don't like something that is a standard operator becoming special syntax. While it's true that string & string is not valid, it's not the case that string & ... is not valid. I dislike dot for the same reason. It's confusing that these would do different things:
'abc' & 'def' ('abc') & 'def'
I like the \ idea because it's clearly syntax and not an operator, but the fact that it doesn't work with comments is annoying since one reason to break a string is to insert comments. I don't like that spaces after the \ are not allowed because trailing spaces are invisible to me but not to the parser. So what if the rule for trailing \ was changed to:
The \ continuation character may be followed by white space and a comment. If a comment is present, there must be at least one whitespace character between the \ and the comment.
That is:
x = [ # THIS WOULD BE ALLOWED 'abc' \ 'def' \ # not the python keyword 'ghi' ]
x = [ # THIS WOULD BE AN ERROR 'abc' \ 'def' # a comment but no continuation \ 'ghi' ]
One thing I like about using \ is that it already works (aside from my proposed comment change). So anyone wanting to write forward/backward-compatible code can just add the \s now. If you want to start enforcing the restriction, just use from __future__ import explicit_string_continuation.
Right, that's a good one! Although I hate the backslash from bad experience with windows. But actually the most reason that I always hated to use "\" for continuation lines is its strict behavior that does not allow any white space after it. Hey, it would be great if that proposal makes it ! cheers - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@stackless.com> Software Consulting : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 121 : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14482 Potsdam : PGP key -> http://pgp.uni-mainz.de phone +49 173 24 18 776 fax +49 (30) 700143-0023 PGP 0x57F3BF04 9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619 305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04 whom do you want to sponsor today? http://www.stackless.com/