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Comment by pvdebbe | Hacker News Reader

One Python gotcha that has bitten people in my company a lot:

    fun_call('string1',
             'string2'
             'string3')

That is, missing commas and subsequent string concatenations can lead to nasty errors. I wish Python didn't nick this from C and would have just enforced the use of + to concat over-length strings, if they need to be split to multiple lines.

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They considered dropping that for Python 3. I forget the reason why they changed their minds, but there's probably a PEP about it. You may find that their discussion will change your mind as well.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3126/

Nothing mind-changing in here. Translations seem to take the biggest hit, but it's largely a matter of company conventions if this is a problem. IMO the grounds of rejection weren't discussed very thoroughly.

Status quo is the sane default. But in this case... I've used this syntax both as a feature and a bug about in equal portion.

I could imagine the new f-string interpolation might have some nice synergy.

I love Python, but I have to agree on this one.

I mean, this one is solvable by not using magic constants. Pretty easy to avoid. Can also lint it.

I don't get what you're saying. How is it possible to write code without string literals?

    subprocess.check_call([
      "/usr/bin/env",
      "echo"
      "hello world"
    ])

I think she meant to not pass the strings but assign them to constants and then pass those.

Yep! But, like I mentioned, linter can catch this too.

he probably meant not using string literals / ints outside of top-level declarations, so you would instead assign all these parameters to "constants" at top level and then use those constants in function calls, hence avoiding this error.

Unless I'm using a string more than once or its meaning is unclear, I always use the literal. In most cases, I find it more legible than having to go look up a constant's definition.

Then yes, I rely on the linter and testing.

How often do people write production software that doesn't have string literals?

In many cases, this invocation of fun_call() would not match its definition signature and it would generate an exception. When that's the case it's not at all a Python gotcha because it halted and forced you to fix the error.

I like this string catenation behavior and I prefer it, even if it causes some confusion in (IMO rare) cases.

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