[Python-ideas] Implicit String Concatenation

[Jason Orendorff]

On 4/11/07, Jim Jewett <jimjjewett at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have never seen a string concatentation that would look worse
> because of a "+".
>
> I *have* seen some bugs where a comma was forgotten, and two arguments
> got invisibly jammed together.  That's a pain to debug in C; in python
> with default values, the interpreter may not even gripe sensibly.

Oh.  I just realized this happens a lot out here.  Where I work, we
use scons, and each SConscript has a long list of filenames:

sourceFiles = [
    'foo.c',
    'bar.c',
    #...many lines omitted...
    'q1000x.c']

It's a common mistake to leave off a comma, and then scons complains
that it can't find 'foo.cbar.c'.  This is pretty bewildering behavior
even if you *are* a Python programmer, and not everyone here is.

-j