[kdmccormick]

Very unfair comparison. Python has:

* three string syntaxes (regular, formatted, and raw) plus byte arrays.

* single vs double quotes, which are insignificant, other than that you don't need to escape the containing literal quote type.

* inline vs multiline.

These all compose in a predictable way.

If you want to be a jerk, you can multiply 4 * 2 * 2 and say "ZOMG 16 string types!!", but that's about as fair as saying that having positive/negative, octal/hex/dec, int/float, and standard/scientific means that a language has 24 numerical types.

[Spivak]

You also forgot implicitly concatenated strings.

    "hello" "world"
    blah = (
      "line"
      "line"
    )

They are actually really useful when you want multi-line formatted strings without indentation and had to be made official when people wanted to take them away.

> If you want to be a jerk, you can multiply 4 * 2 * 2 and say "ZOMG 16 string types!!"

And now you understand how they calculated the number of string types in YAML.