[Python-ideas] Descouraging the implicit string concatenation

[Guido van Rossum]

I use the feature regularly for long error messages, and when combined with
.format() or % it's not so easy to replace it with a + (it would require
adding parentheses).

So I am against formally discouraging it or adding something to PEP 8.

However linters could warn about lists of comma-separated strings with a
missing comma.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018, 07:54 Oleg Broytman <phd at phdru.name> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 01:18:06AM +1100, Steven D'Aprano <
> steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 02:31:58PM +0100, Oleg Broytman wrote:
> > >    Once I stumbled over a bug caused by this in legacy code in
> > > production. Fixing it was quite painful!
> >
> > Did you mean that *finding* the bug was painful? Fixing it should be
> > trivially easy: add a comma.
>
>    The most painful was that the bug destroyed important information
> that was hard to fix later (enterprise code in production, the code is
> certificated and hard to replace).
>
>    The second pain was to understand what was going on. When a program
> report "The OID in the certificate doesn't belong to the proper root
> OID" it's simpler to decide that the certificate is wrong, not that the
> list of root OIDs to check is wrong.
>
>    The third pain was to find the bug. It's hard to spot a problem in
> the list
>
> oids = [
>     "1.2.6.254.14."
>     "19.9.91.281",
>     "1.2.6.263.12."
>     "481.7.9.6.3.87"
>     "1.2.7.4.214.7."
>     "9.1.52.12",
> ]
>
>    There were about 50 OIDs like these, and the missing comma was in the
> middle of the list.
>
> > --
> > Steve
>
> Oleg.
> --
>      Oleg Broytman            http://phdru.name/            phd at phdru.name
>            Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
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