Ben Finney wrote: > Please don't hide your new thread as a reply to an existing, unrelated > message. Start a new message if your message isn't actually a reply. > > My apologies. My email client was apparently hiding some important headers from me.
>> The colon that divides the statement therefore seems redundant. The >> colon could continue to be used for single-line statements: >> if self.hungry: self.eat() >> > > Why have two different syntaxes for the same statement? > > Why am I allowed separate statements with semi-colons in addition to newlines? Why have triple-quoted long strings in addition to single-quoted short strings? Why do I have to type backslash to continue a line, except when I'm currently inside parens, brackets, or braces? The answer is that it's a matter of convenience for the most common case, with some exceptions allowed for the exceptional cases. >> I think the colon could be omitted from every type of compound >> statement: 'if', 'for', 'def', 'class', whatever. Am I missing >> anything? >> > > A use case. What problem is being solved by introducing this > inconsistency? > The same problem that is solved by not having to type parens around the 'if' conditional, a la C and its derivatives. That is, it's unnecessary typing to no good advantage, IMHO. I was coding in Ruby for several months and got very comfortable with just typing the if conditional and hitting return, without any extra syntax. When I came back to Python, I found that I felt annoyed every time I typed the colon, since it obviously isn't required. The FAQ says that the colon increases readability, but I'm skeptical. The indentation seems to provide more than enough of a visual clue as to where the if conditional ends. As far as using the FAQ as gospel, the FAQ also provides arguments for why there isn't a with statement or a switch statement. The with statement has already been implemented in 2.5 and there's a PEP to implement switch (3103). - Mike -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
