On 11/12/05, Raymond Hettinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > The motivation
> > is to be able to write multilined strings easily without damaging the
> > visual indentation of the source code
>
> That is somewhat misleading. We already have that ability. What is
> being proposed is moving existing code to a different namespace. So the
> motivation is really something like:
>
> I want to write
> s = s.dedent()
> because it is too painful to write
> s = textwrap.dedent(s)
>
Sorry, I didn't mean to mislead. I wrote "easily" - I guess using the
current textwrap.dedent isn't really hard, but still, writing:
import textwrap
...
r = some_func(textwrap.dedent('''\
line1
line2'''))
Seems harder to me than simply
r = some_func('''\
line1
line2'''.dedent())
This example brings up another reason why "dedent" us a method is a
good idea: It is a common convention to indent things according to the
last opening bracket. "dedent" as a function makes the indentation
grow in at least 7 characters, and in 16 characters if you don't do
"from textwrap import dedent".
Another reason to make it a method is that I think it focuses
attention at the string, which comes first, instead of at the
"textwrap.dedent", which is only there to make the code look nicer.
And, a last reason: making dedent a built-in method makes it a more
"official" way of doing things, and I think that this way of writing a
multilined string inside an indented block is really the best way to
do it.
Noam
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