Trying again after I was mysteriously moderated. Thanks Ethan for fixing that.
On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 6:59 PM Jonathan Goble <jcgob...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, May 28, 2022, 4:25 PM Gregory P. Smith <g...@krypto.org> wrote: > >> >> On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 12:55 PM Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> >> wrote: >> >>> >>> On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 12:11 MRAB >>> >>> Names in Python are case-sensitive, yet the string prefixes are >>>> case-/insensitive/. >>>> >>>> Why? >>> >>> >>> IIRC we copied this from C for numeric suffixes (0l and 0L are the >>> same; also hex digits and presumably 0XA == 0xa) and then copied that for >>> string prefixes without thinking about it much. I guess it’s too late to >>> change. >>> >> >> Given that 99.99% of code uses lower case string prefixes we *could* >> change it, it'd just take a longer deprecation cycle - you'd probably want >> a few releases where the upper case prefixes become an error in files >> without a `from __future__ import case_sensitive_quote_prefixes` rather >> than jumping straight from parse time DeprecationWarning to repurposing the >> uppercase to have a new meaning. The inertia behind doing that over the >> course of 5+ years is high. Implying that we'd need a compelling reason to >> orchestrate it. None has sprung up. >> > > There already is a semantic meaning in one case, though not in Python > proper. Some syntax highlighters, including the one used in VSCode, treat r > and R differently: the former is syntax highlighted as a regex and the > latter is syntax highlighted as an generic string. I have seen > project-specific style guides advising to use r/R accordingly. > > So there is meaningful use of capital R in real-world code, and any future > change to require lowercase would need to at least consider the impact on > that use case. > >>
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