Last fall Larry Hastings made a suggestion for adding a way to make
so-called "print-based debugging" easier with f-strings. Basically the
approach is that f-strings would be able to produce the text of the
expression and the value of that expression, without repeating the
expression in the f-sting. No more writing f'foo={foo}, bar={bar}'. foo
and bar should each only be in there once each!
At PyCon US 2019 I did a lightning talk about this, suggesting the
syntax of !d, so that if foo="Hello", then f"{foo!d}" would produce
"foo='Hello'". That is, it's the text of the expression, followed by an
equal sign, followed by the repr of the expression. I have implemented
this and a PR exists. Arbitrary expressions are allowed. I heard from
core devs and end users after this talk, and all were positive.
After that lightning talk, Larry and I talked about it some more, and
for a number of reasons decided that it would make more sense if the
syntax used an = sign. So we came up with f"{foo=}", which would also
produce "foo='Hello'".
The reasons for the change are:
- Having '=' in the expression is a better mnemonic than !d.
- By not using a conversion starting with !, we can compose = with the
existing ! conversions, !r, !s, and the rarely used !a.
- We can let the user have a little more control of the resulting string.
Another thing I like about this approach over !d is that the patch is
simpler, because there are fewer special cases. And because there are
fewer special cases in the code, I think the proposal is easier to
explain than !d (in particular how it interacts (or doesn't!) with
format specifiers).
There's a good rationale here, along with a PR:
https://bugs.python.org/issue36817.
My plan is to commit this change before 3.8b1. If anyone would like to
discuss it at PyCon, I'll be around until about 10:30 am on Tuesday.
I'll be in the CPython sprint room, and I'll be watching bpo, too.
Eric
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