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)])
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Answer 1

My guess is that num doesn't define the method __str__(), so str() has to do a second lookup for __repr__.

The backticks look directly for __repr__. If that's true, then using repr() instead of the backticks should give you the same results.