Python accent graves bad practice?

Question

I have recently come to understand that we can use the following as a shorthand for repr(x) in Python:

`x`

However, I have rarely seen this in practice. Is it considered to be bad practice or unpythonic? Or are there any other reasons for which it is rarely used?

It was removed from Py3k. For me is enough reason not to use it. — JBernardo, Oct 11 '12 at 00:59
And they were deprecated because they are hard to read and verging on implicit when `repr` is so much more clear. See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1673071/what-do-backticks-mean-to-the-python-interpreter-num — msw, Oct 11 '12 at 01:00
It was totally worth it to save 4 characters when we were paying > $1/GB for harddrive space, now harddrives got cheaper. Noone cares much if you waste 0.0000004 cents — John La Rooy, Oct 11 '12 at 01:09

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 11 '12 at 01:15

I don't think many people would argue that it's Pythonic especially since it's been removed from Python3

Prior to that, I would never use it in real code. The problem being that quite a few developers didn't know what it was for, and it's not very easy to search for.

There has also been a move in Python3 to have .__next__() method instead of .next() for iterators, which strengthens the idea that repr(x) calls x.__repr__() etc.

Python accent graves bad practice?

1 Answers1