On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 3:31 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > On the other hand if you impose a convention: Constants file-module has > NOTHING but constants, thats a non-formal convention and thats ok. > > If however you mix it up with other (real) code, you'll get a bloody mess. > This kind of stuff "7*24*60*60" is borderline and in my experience > its a slippery slope that ends up being more trouble than its worth.
Agreed, and which side of the border it's on is a matter of opinion. Suppose you were writing an INI-style parser - would you include this feature? I probably wouldn't include arithmetic, as it's usually more effort than it's worth, but it isn't a bad feature inherently. I'd definitely not include backreferencing (FOO = "bar", followed by FOO_LEN = len(FOO) or something), or the ability to chain assignments (FOO = BAR = 0), so those would be advised against in the convention docs. On the other hand, a quoted string requirement ("foo\nbar") makes a huge amount of sense in certain contexts, and I can imagine implementing quite a lot of a programming language's string literal syntax. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list