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Comment by oa2022 | Hacker News Reader

oa2022

This change would break a lot of legacy code for no good reason

The most common way to split a string in lines is using this concatenation formula.

> This change would break a lot of legacy code for no good reason

Preventing a bug that occurs in 5% of observed codebases (and anecdotally, happens to me during development all the time) seems like about as good as reasons get.

Swapping a perfectly fine print statement for a function, on the other hand… that’s the breaking change in Py3k that’s never seemed worth it to me.

I've never heard from Guido on this, but I've always felt that he created the print keyword in the very early days, just because it was easy and he always thought the language would be a niche small language. But, as the popularity of the language increased, the print keyword just stand out as a sore thumb and he just had to fix that.

But wasn't this proposal part of the move to python 3? strings where broken left and right anyway.

Right, there was lots of deliberate breakage, _and_ this is purely syntaxual hence the sort of thing 2to3 could trivially deal with.

> the sort of thing 2to3 could trivially deal with

2to3 could also trivially add +, and if anything, that would actually help surface these kind of bugs, because if you randomly see a + in the middle of your list of strings, it's much easier to spot the bug than if there was a missing comma.

> The most common way to split a string in lines is using this concatenation formula.

Is it really? I tend to avoid it in favour of ””” or ‘\n’.join(<list of lines>), because it looks like a mistake.

Triple quotes are kind of annoying if the string is indented, but you can just not indent the string to avoid the whitespace.

I use it, personally. The other two options I find too aesthetically displeasing: not indenting the string looks bad when it's within an indented block of code, and using join and putting the strings in a list is just too much boilerplate. I will use """ if I don't care about the extra space put at the start of each line by the indentation.

I think you want textwrap.dedent

https://docs.python.org/3/library/textwrap.html#textwrap.ded...

or inspect.cleandoc.

https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/inspect.html#inspect.cle...

Both of your solutions are great but don't fully cover the use case. They are useful for multiline strings, but implicit concatenation is also often used to break long strings that may not have newlines.

In y opinion that would be better served with ‘’.join( ‘hello’, ‘world’)

No footgun potential, and as others have mentioned the “good usage” would often be bad simply because it ends up looking like a mistake even if it’s intentional.

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