[Python-ideas] Literate python?

Wed Mar 9 03:01:25 CET 2011

On 3/8/2011 5:02 PM, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Wild idea, swiped directly from haskell/ghc:
>> How about making the python interpreter just a little bit smarter,

It already is ;-)
Though not exactly well known, expression statements that consist of a 
literal (number or string) are ignored -- except for string literals in 
docstring position (and then, they are attached as attributes, rather 
than being in the code object.
def f():
 'doc' # to .__doc__
 1 # ignored
 (1,2,3) # will not be ignored, even though constand and unused
 # comments are ignored
 'same as comment'
 '''
 multiline
 comment
 '''
from dis import dis
dis(f)
 >>>
 4 0 LOAD_CONST 5 ((1, 2, 3))
 3 POP_TOP
 10 4 LOAD_CONST 4 (None)
 7 RETURN_VALUE
> If the first non-white-space character after the shebang line (if
> present) is a backslash, then the compiler ignores lines until it sees
> a line consisting of \begin{code} (which could be the first line),
> then compiles lines until it sees a line consisting of \end{code},
> after which it switches back to searching for \begin{code}.

So this appears unnecessary. Just use quotes.
The main problems is that program editors are generally not smart enough 
to do auto text wrapping within multiline strings.
-- 
Terry Jan Reedy