On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:26:54 -0700, Douglas Alan wrote: > A friend of mine is just learning Python, and he's a bit tweaked about > how unrecognized escape sequences are treated in Python. ... > In any case, I think my friend should mellow out a bit, but we both > consider this something of a wart. He's just more wart-phobic than I am. > Is there any way that this behavior can be considered anything other > than a wart? Other than the unconvincing claim that you can use this > "feature" to save you a bit of typing sometimes when you actually want a > backslash to be in your string?
I'd put it this way: a backslash is just an ordinary character, except when it needs to be special. So Python's behaviour is "treat backslash as a normal character, except for these exceptions" while the behaviour your friend wants is "treat a backslash as an error, except for these exceptions". Why should a backslash in a string literal be an error? -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
