Why do this?

[Tim Golden]

[Matthew Warren]

| Blame outlook and AutoCaps. If number were a number I would write
| 
| print "There are",number,"ways to skin a "+furryanimal

You see now that strikes me as a bit mixed up. Why not simply use?

print "a", number, "c", string

| > altho' print is slated for replacement by a function in Python 3.0
| > at which point they'll be necessary.
| 
| ? Why do that, point me at a PEP if required and I'll read it :)

Oft-discussed, and personally I prefer it as a statement,
but the edict has gone out. Look at PEP 3100:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3100/

| That's something I wasn't aware of, and I think I'll try if I find
| myself going
| 
| "something"+dict['thingummy']+" red ones and "+dict['colour']+" ones"
| 
| The dict substitution does feel a bit easier to read compared to the
| concatenation, because of the dict['    ']  noise.

Ultimately it's down to you, but I think you may be doing
your code a disservice by so assiduously avoiding the %s-style
of string building. Your last example suggests that you
see the dict-subtitution flavour simply as an alternative to doing
"a" + dict[key1] + "b" + dict[key2] etc. I doubt if I've *ever* 
started with the one and ended with the other; rather I've seen that
my code would be more readable if I put/had what I wanted into a
dict (or a dict-like object; just has to support __getitem__).

An easy example of this is where -- like many, I believe -- I prefer my
database rows to come in dict-like objects, rather than the tuples which
the dbapi stipulates. Again, like many, I've used or rolled my own
wrapper
which means I can do things like this, where my dbutils.fetch function
returns some kind of object which traps __getitem__ calls for column
names and returns the appropriate entry in the underlying tuple:

<fake code>
import dbutils
db = db_module.connect (...)
for row in dbutils.fetch (db, "SELECT * FROM blah"):
  print "Customer %(name)s (%(id)d) has %(n_orders)d outstanding orders
since %(last_order_date)s" % row

</fake code>

TJG

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