What do backticks mean to the python interpreter: `num`

Question

I\'m playing around with list comprehensions and I came across this little snippet on another site:

return \'\'.join([`num` for num in xrange(loop_count)])
<         


        

Answer 1

Backtick quoting is generally non-useful and gone in Python 3.

For what it's worth, this:

''.join(map(repr, xrange(10000000)))

is marginally faster than the backtick version for me. But worrying about this is probably a premature optimisation.