[Python-ideas] Custom string prefixes

[Andrew Barnert]

On May 30, 2013, at 3:42, Haoyi Li <haoyi.sg at gmail.com> wrote:

> > But still, it's amazing how C++11-ish this discussion is getting. Which may be a good hint that (as you suggest) this feature isn't a good fit for Python.
> 
> I don't agree with this; while C++ is huge and terrible, C++11 actually has some pretty good stuff (e.g. real lambdas, with real closures and real lexical scoping! u"unicode" and r"raw" strings!). Dismissing something as bad just because it's something C++11 has is a terrible idea and immediately shuts out a whole range of interesting possibilities.

C++11 is a set of very clever, and often very nice, improvements, but nearly all of the improvements are solutions to problems unique to C++90.

And if you step back, the problem most people are trying to solve here is that they don't want to do string processing inline within a function because they're worried about performance. (Of course the OP wasn't even worried about that; he just wanted to save a few keystrokes making decimals. But most of the follow ups haven't been about that.) I'd guess that 90% of the time those performance worries are misguided, and the remaining 10% can already be solved by moving the strings to module level, caching the results, etc. So, we're looking for syntactic sugar for a way to accomplish one of those solutions more nicely. That's a very different problem than making strings (and other types) accessible to a compile-time metalanguage that's radically different from the runtime language, which is what C++ was solving.

(PS, you misattributed most of your quotes to me instead of Eric Snow. But I'm sure he'll still see then.)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20130530/94224952/attachment.html>