Minor, minor style question

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

On 01-Mar-2002 Cameron Laird wrote:
> Why would I prefer
>   string = ""
>   string = string + "abc "
>   string = string + "def "
>   string = string + "xyz"
> over
>   string = "abc " + \
>             "def " + \
>             "xyz"
> ?  I see a lot of the former in contexts I associate
> with Visual Basic- or JavaScript-majority folkways.
> Is there an attraction to the redundancy (and fragil-
> ity!) I'm missing?  Are \-s *so* deprecated?

According to posts by people like Tim Peters the preferred idiom is more like:

l = ["abc", "def", "xyz"]
s = string.join("", l)

i.e. build up a list of pieces through out the function and then join() them at
the end.