[Python-Dev] PEP-498: Literal String Formatting

[David Mertz]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
>
> I think it has to do with the nature of the programs that people write.
> I write software for internal use in a large company. In the last 13
> years there, I've written literally hundreds of individual programs,
> large and small. I just checked: literally 100% of my calls to
> %-formatting (older code) or str.format (in newer code) could be
> replaced with f-strings. And I think every such use would be an
> improvement.
>

I'm sure that pretty darn close to 100% of all the uses of %-formatting and
str.format I've written in the last 13 years COULD be replaced by the
proposed f-strings (I suppose about 16 years for me, actually).  But I
think that every single such replacement would make the programs worse.
I'm not sure if it helps to mention that I *did* actually "write the book"
on _Text Processing in Python_ :-).

The proposal just continues to seem far too magical to me.  In the training
I now do for Continuum Analytics (I'm in charge of the training program
with one other person), I specifically have a (very) little bit of the
lessons where I mention something like:

  print("{foo} is {bar}".format(**locals()))

But I give that entirely as a negative example of abusing code and
introducing fragility.  f-strings are really the same thing, only even more
error-prone and easier to get wrong.  Relying on implicit context of the
runtime state of variables that are merely in scope feels very break-y to
me still.  If I had to teach f-strings in the future, I'd teach it as a
Python wart.

That said, there *is* one small corner where I believe f-strings add
something helpful to the language.  There is no really concise way to spell:

  collections.ChainMap(locals(), globals(), __builtins__.__dict__).

If we could spell that as, say `lgb()`, that would let str.format() or
%-formatting pick up the full "what's in scope".  To my mind, that's the
only good thing about the f-string idea.

Yours, David...

-- 
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