Allowing comments after the line continuation backslash

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:16:46 +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> In message <4CCE6FF6.2050408 at v.loewis.de>, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> 
>> (in fact, I can't think any situation where I would use the backslash).
> 
>     for \
>         Description, Attr, ColorList \
>     in \
>         (
>             ("normal", "image", MainWindow.ColorsNormalList),
>             ("highlighted", "highlight",
>             MainWindow.ColorsHighlightedList), ("selected", "select",
>             MainWindow.ColorsSelectedList),
>         ) \
>     :
>        ...
>     #end for


If it were your intention to show why backslashes should be avoided, you 
succeeded admirably.

The above can be written much more cleanly as:

    for Description, Attr, ColorList in (
     ("normal", "image", MainWindow.ColorsNormalList),
     ("highlighted", "highlight", MainWindow.ColorsHighlightedList),
     ("selected", "select", MainWindow.ColorsSelectedList),
    ):
        pass


with no backslashes required. An even better way would be to given the 
tuples descriptive names, so that anyone maintaining this software can 
easily see what they are for:

    # States should be tuples (description, attribute name, colour list).
    standard = ("normal", "image", MainWindow.ColorsNormalList)
    highlighted = ("highlighted", "highlight",
      MainWindow.ColorsHighlightedList)
    selected = ("selected", "select", MainWindow.ColorsSelectedList)
    for desc, attr, color_list in (standard, highlighted, selected):
        pass


-- 
Steven