[Python-ideas] Bring line continuation to multi-level dictionary lookup

[Andrew Barnert]

On Sep 16, 2015, at 21:07, John Wong <gokoproject at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> So here I am, thinking, what if we can do this?
> 
> response(
>     ["DescribeDBSnapshotsResponse"]
>     ["DescribeDBSnapshotsResult"]
> )

This already has a perfectly valid meaning: you have a list of one string, you're indexing it with another string, and passing the result to a function. If this isn't obvious, try this example:

    frobulate(['a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'][vowel])

So, giving it a second meaning would be ambiguous.

Also, there's already a perfectly good way to write what you want. (Actually two, because square brackets continue the exact same way parens do, but I wouldn't recommend that here.)

    (response
     ["DescribeDBSnapshotsResponse"]
     ["DescribeDBSnapshotsResult"]
    )

That looks no uglier than your suggestion, and a lot less ugly when buried inside a larger expression.

(I think it might look nicer to indent the bracketed keys, but I think that technically violates PEP 8.)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20150916/d6777feb/attachment-0001.html>