[Python-Dev] PEP 498 f-string: is it a preprocessor?

[Victor Stinner]

Le mardi 11 août 2015, Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> a écrit :
>
> Oops, I was thinking of going the other way (str.format -> f''). Yes, I
> think you're correct.


Ah ok.

But in any event, I don't see the distinction between calling
> str.format(), and calling each object's __format__ method. Both are
> compliant with the PEP, which doesn't specify exactly how the
> transformation is done.
>

When I read the PEP for the first time, I understood that you reimplemented
str.format() using the __format__() methods. So i understood that it's a
new formatting language and it would be tricky to reimplement it, for
example in a library providing i18n with f-string syntax (I'm not sure that
it's feasible, it's just an example). I also expected many subtle
differences between .format() and f-string.

In fact, f-string is quite standard and not new, it's just a compact syntax
to call .format() (well, with some minor and acceptable subtle
differences). For me, it's a good thing to rely on the existing .format()
method because it's well known (no need to learn a new formatting language).

Maybe you should rephrase some parts of your PEP and rewrite some examples
to say that's it's "just" a compact syntax to call .format().

--

For me, calling __format__() multiple times or format() once matters, for
performances, because I contributed to the implementation of
_PyUnicodeWriter. I spent a lot of time to keep good performances when the
implementation of Unicode was rewritten for the PEP 393. With this PEP,
writing an efficient implementation is much harder. The dummy benchmark is
to compare Python 2.7 str.format() (bytes!) to Python 3 str.format()
(Unicode!). Users want similar performances! If I recall correctly, Python
3 is not bad (faster is some corner cases).

Concatenate temporary strings is less efficient Than _PyUnicodeWriter
(single buffer) when you have UCS-1, UCS-2 and UCS-4 strings (1/2/4 bytes
per character). It's more efficient to write directly into the final format
(UCS-1/2/4), even if you may need to convert the buffer from UCS-1 to UCS-2
(and maybe even one more time to UCS-4).

Victor
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