Is Line Continuation With Backslash Dangerous In Python?

I understand that current best practice for line continuation is to use implied continuation inside parenthesis. For example: a = (1 + 2 + 3 + 4) From PEP8 (https://www.pytho

Solution 1:

"Subtly wrong" is subjective; each has her own tolerance of subtlety.

One often-cited example of possibly harmful line continuation, regardless of \-separated or implicit, is the continuation of strings in a container structure:

available_resources = [
    "color monitor",
    "big disk",
    "Cray""on-line drawing routines",
    "mouse",
    "keyboard",
    "power cables",
]

Do the available resources include a Cray supercomputer, or Crayon-line drawing routines? (This example is from the book "Expert C Programming", adapted for Python here).

This code block isn't ambiguous, but its visual appearance created by continuation + indentation can be deceptive, and may cause human error in understanding.

Solution 2:

One case I can think of is when the programmer forgets a \. This is especially likely when someone comes and adds values at a later date. Though this example is still somewhat contrived because the continuation lines have to have the same indentation level (otherwise it would fail with an IndentationError).

Example:

a = 1 \
+ 2 \+ 3
assert a == 6

Later, someone adds a line:

a = 1 \
+ 2 \
+ 3    # Whoops, forgot to add \ !
+ 4
assert a == 10  # Nope

Solution 3:

I think like @0x5453, if you wrongly add backslash to your code. This backslash cause the comment to be concat with a.

a = "Some text. " \
"""Here are some multiline comments
that will be added to a"""