Whatever happened to String Interpolation?

[Tim Hammerquist]

Fernando Pérez <fperez528 at yahoo.com> graced us by uttering:
> Tim Hammerquist wrote:
[ snip ]
>> This slippery slope is one of many reasons many Pythonistas don't
>> want creeping featurism to infect their language.
> 
> I honestly don't see it as a slippery slope. Ping's implementation 
> seems to 'do the right thing' in all cases, produces no surprises and 
> doesn't at all require the kind of grossness you quoted.

It doesn't require said "grossness", but it didn't do what it looked
like...at least not to these eyes.  Again, that's just me. =)

> I don't see interpolated strings as being a 'slippery slope', the
> concept of special strings is *already* in the language.

Fair enough. Perhaps I spoke too soon.

> I certainly *don't* want  to see Python go the perl route (and I've 
> written a lot of perl, so I know exactly what it's like). But that 
> doesn't mean that there aren't things where python's current syntax 
> can actually end up leading to unnecessary ugliness.

This seems to be a quite prominent fear in this NG.  ;)

> In fact, things like 'blah %(var)s' to me look a lot less readable 
> (and line noise like, perl-like, whatever) than 'blah $var'. Or is it 
> that in Python there's such a rabid fear of $ as to not even admit a 
> case where something like it may be useful?

It's possible.

It's always important, though, to remember where we came from:

    cout << "Enter a number: " << crlf;
    cin >> i_num;
    cout << "You entered " << i_num << crlf;

;)

Tim Hammerquist
-- 
Sometimes we can choose the path we follow.
Sometimes our choices are made for us.
And sometimes we have no choice at all.
    -- Morpheus, The Sandman