Allowing comments after the line continuation backslash

Ulrich Eckhardt eckhardt at satorlaser.com
Mon Nov 1 03:50:36 EDT 2010


Yingjie Lan wrote:
> I would like to have comments after the line continuation backslash.
> 
>>>> if a > 0 \ #comments for this condition
>       and b > 0:
>     #do something here

Historically, and also in Python, the backslash escapes the immediately
following character. That means that _nothing_ may follow the backslash and
that the backslash is not a "line continuation backslash" per se.

Now, there are ways around this, just add parens:

  if (a > 0
      and b > 0):

Note that this also applies to (), [] and {} when forming tuples, lists and
dicts, which you can spread across different lines.


> This is currently not OK, but this might be a good thing to have.

I'd actually argue that even the currently used backslash is a bad idea to
have.

Uli

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