On 12/27/2011 1:04 PM, Rick Johnson wrote:
But this brings up a very important topic. Why do we even need triple quote string literals to span multiple lines? Good question, and one i have never really mused on until now.
I have, and the reason I thought of is that people, including me, too ofter forget or accidentally fail to properly close a string literal, and type something like 'this is a fairly long single line string" and wonder why they get a syntax error lines later, or, in interactive mode, why the interpreter does not respond to a newline.
Color coding editors make it easier to catch such errors, but they were less common in 1991. And there is still uncolored interactive mode.
There may also be a technical reason as to how the lexer works. -- Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
