How would this be different from a function sql() that operates on one of these new t-strings?
The syntactic sugar of changing it from sql(t"...") doesn't seem particularly valuable. The novel thing about t-strings is that they change the parsing at compile-time.
It’s different from a function the same way f”” is different from f(“”) and t”” is different from t(“”)
There’s nothing stopping you from building a Python function that parses a string looking for {} and then searching globals for those variables. And you can extend that to also do some code execution and formatting.
To me the real sugar of f-strings is that the editor knows that it’s a template and not just a string. Expanding this to having SQL and regex syntax highlighting, linting and code formatting inside my Python code is a pretty cool prospect.