On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Nathan Rice <nathan.alexander.r...@gmail.com> wrote: > Quotes are obnoxious in the nesting sense because everyone uses quotes > for string delimiters. By the same token, quotes are wonderful > because not only are they intuitive to programmers, but they are > intuitive in general. Parenthesis are pretty much in the same boat... > I *HATE* them nested, but they are so intuitive that replacing them is > a non starter; Just write code that doesn't nest parenthesis.
Parentheses have different starting and ending delimiters and must be 'properly nested' (ie there must be exactly-matching inner parens inside any given set of outer parens (note that English has similar rules - you can't mis-nest parentheses (at any depth) in either language)). You can't guarantee the same about quoted strings - suppose the starting delimiter were ' and the ending " (or vice versa), it still wouldn't deal with the issue of coming across an apostrophe inside a quoted string. In actual fact, the real problem is that quoted strings need to be able to contain _anything_. The only true solution to that is length-provided strings: s = "4spam q = "14Hello, world!\n This works beautifully in interchange formats, but rather poorly in source code (or, for that matter, anything editable). ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
