[Python-ideas] Implicit string literal concatenation considered harmful?

[Ethan Furman]

On 05/10/2013 11:48 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I just spent a few minutes staring at a bug caused by a missing comma
> -- I got a mysterious argument count error because instead of foo('a',
> 'b') I had written foo('a' 'b').
>
> This is a fairly common mistake, and IIRC at Google we even had a lint
> rule against this (there was also a Python dialect used for some
> specific purpose where this was explicitly forbidden).
>
> Now, with modern compiler technology, we can (and in fact do) evaluate
> compile-time string literal concatenation with the '+' operator, so
> there's really no reason to support 'a' 'b' any more. (The reason was
> always rather flimsy; I copied it from C but the reason why it's
> needed there doesn't really apply to Python, as it is mostly useful
> inside macros.)
>
> Would it be reasonable to start deprecating this and eventually remove
> it from the language?

Sounds good to me.

--
~Ethan~