python equivalent to perl's qw()

Well, there's definitely no way to do exactly what you can do in Perl, because Python will complain about undefined variable names and a syntax error (missing comma, perhaps). But I would write it like this (in Python 2.X):

print '%8s %8s %8s' % ('date', 'price', 'ret')

If you're really attached to Perl's syntax, I guess you could define a function qw like this:

def qw(s):    return tuple(s.split())

and then you could write

print '%8s %8s %8s' % qw('date price ret')

which is basically Perl-like except for the one pair of quotes on the argument to qw. But I'd hesitate to recommend that. At least, don't do it only because you miss Perl - it only enables your denial that you're working in a new programming language now ;-) It's like the old story about Pascal programmers who switch to C and create macros

#define BEGIN {#define END   }

"date price ret".split()

QW() is often used to print column headings using join() in Perl. Column heads in the real-world are sometimes long -- making join("\t", qw()) very useful because it's easier to read and helps to eliminate typos (e.g. "x","y" or "x\ty"). Below is a related approach in real-world Python:

    print("\t".join('''PubChemId Column ESImode Library.mzmed      Library.rtmed Metabolite newID Feature.mzmed Feature.rtmed      Count ppmDiff rtDiff'''.split()))

The triple quote string is a weird thing because it doubles as a comment. In this context, however, it is a string and it frees us from having to worry about line breaks (as qw() would).

Thanks to the previous replies for reveling this approach.