On Sun, Jan 16, 2022 at 11:41:52PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2022 at 11:18 PM Steven D'Aprano <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Not to mention:
> >
> > r(1, 2, 3) # look up r, call it with parameters
> > r[1, 2, 3] # look up r, subscript it
> > r"1, 2, 3" # a string literal
>
> Strings behave differently in many many ways. Are there any non-string
> types that differ?
There are plenty of non-string types which differ :-)
Differ in what way? I don't understand your question.
You were concerned that adding a prefix to a delimiter in the form of
f{...} would be a bug magnet, but we have had prefixes on delimiters for
30 years in the form of r"..." etc, and it hasn't been a problem.
I mean, sure, the occasional beginner might get confused and write
len{mystring}
and if by some fluke they call f() rather than len() they will get a
silent failure instead of a SyntaxError, but is this really a serious
problem that is common enough to get labelled "a bug magnet"?
I've been coding in Python for two decades and I still occassionally
mess up round and square brackets, especially late at night, and I won't
tell you how often I write my dict displays with equal signs
{key=value}, or misspell str.center.
And I still cringe about the time a few years back where my brain forgot
that Python spells it "None" rather than "nil" like in Pascal, and I
spent about an hour writing a ton of "if obj is nil"... tests.
Typos and brain farts happen.
> > Reading this makes my eyes bleed:
> >
> > >>> <1, 2, 3> < <1, 2, 3, 4>
> > True
>
> Fair point, but I can't imagine people comparing two literals like
> that.
They don't have to be literals inside the brackets. Especially in the
REPL, `{*a} < {*b}` is a quick way of testing that every element of a is
an element of b.
[...]
> > Triple quoted strings say hello :-)
>
> See above, strings are different, and people treat them differently.
Do they? How are they different? You have a start delimiter and an end
delimiter.
The only difference I see is that with strings the delimiter is the
same, instead of a distinct open and close delimiter. But that
difference is surely not a reason to reject the use of a prefix.
"We can't use a prefix because the closing delimiter is different from
the opening delimiter" does not follow.
--
Steve
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