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 }