[Python-3000] Proposed changes to PEP3101 advanced string formatting -- please discuss and vote!

[Patrick Maupin]

On 3/14/07, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14/03/07, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:
>
> FWIW, I tend to agree with most of Josiah's responses. In particular,
> I'm afraid I hate the whitespace-sensitive alternative syntax. %...%
> syntax would be a reasonable alternative for Windows users, but I take
> your point that % is already magical. I'd stick with {foo} and ${foo}
> (would you expect to allow the normal shortcut of $foo where foo is in
> the form of a simple identifier?)

I originally wasn't going to support $foo, but when it was mentioned
to me earlier (being a congenial sort of guy) I decided to put it in
(it's in one version of the documentation checked into subversion),
but after thinking about it some more I decided against it.  I'm not
really that big on saving keystrokes, and to me, $foo instead of
${foo} is a significant impairment to readability because there is
more than one way to do it within the same format string.  (It also
drives complexity into the documentation and into the parser -- the
rules about when you need {} and when you don't can get complicated.)

> I get the impression you are close to having a publishable
> implementation - I'd say, get it released and get some feedback from
> real use. (If it's portable to 2.5, or even older versions, that is).
> You can mark it as alpha and explicitly note that some design issues
> still remain to be resolved.

Yeah, it works pretty well, so after incorporating changes from this
round of feedback, I think that's probably a pretty good plan.
(Anybody who doesn't mind the occasional arrow in their back can
already download and play with it.  It's under sandbox/trunk/pep3101.)

Thanks,
Pat