New-style string formatting (Was: Re: Tuple "detection")

[Ian Bicking]

On Tue, 2003-05-20 at 14:11, Gerrit Holl wrote:
> Daniel Dittmar schreef op dinsdag 20 mei om 19:08:16 +0000:
> > > because the '%' is redundant; it's a much smaller change:
> > 
> > redundant only for the common case of
> > "string %s %s" % (value1, value2)
> > but not for
> > "string %s %s" % db.getRow ()
> 
> This would become:
> 
> "string %s %s"(*db.getrow())

Maybe you would be happy with the idea of using * and ** prefixes in
literals (well, at least *), like:

  (a, *b, c) == (a,) + tuple(b) + (c,)

And possibly:

  {'a': b, **c} 
meaning:
  tmp = {'a': b}
  tmp.update(c)

It still won't fix the problem of unintentially passing a tuple to %,
but maybe it would fix some of the problems.

Probably underlying this is that you like function call syntax (with
keywords, and *args/**kw) more than creating a literal.  I agree -- it
is a more friendly syntax in the context of string substitution.  But
maybe that can be better generalized with slightly richer literals.

  Ian