Taking a Template parameter into a database library's `execute` method is a big bright billboard level hint that the method is going to process the template parameters with the intent to make the query safe. The documentation will also describe the behavior.

You're right that the authors of such libraries could choose to do something different with the template parameter. But none of them will, for normal interface design reasons.

A library author could also write an implementation of a `plus` function on a numerical type that takes another numerical type, and return a string with the two numbers concatenated, rather than adding them together.

But nobody will do that, because libraries with extremely surprising behavior like that won't get used by anybody, and library authors don't want to write useless libraries. This is the same.

The original comment said that it'd replace

    db.execute("QUERY WHERE name = ?", (name,))

with

    db.execute(t"QUERY WHERE name = {name}")

It's true that in theory `db.execute` could ignore semantics and concatenate together the template and variables to make a string without doing any sanitisation, but isn't the same true of the syntax it was claimed to replace?

Just because templates (or the previous syntax of passing in variables separately) could be used in a way that's equivalent safety-wise to an f-string by a poorly designed library does not mean that they add nothing over an f-string in general - they move the interpolation into db.execute where it can do its own sanitization and, realistically, sqlite3 and other libraries explicitly updated to take these will use it to do proper sanitization.

Sure, and the safe() function proposed upthread might also just be doing logging.