Georg Brandl wrote: > Ron Adam wrote: > >> Michael Hobbs wrote: >> >> >>> 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. >>> >> I'm not sure why '\'s are required to do multi-line before the colon. >> > > Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. > > Georg >
Eh? So multi-line strings are special enough to create a new syntax, like, say, triple-quoted strings? Very long expressions aren't special enough to create a special backslash token to continue the expression on the next line? Multiple short expressions aren't special enough to create a special semi-colon token to combine them on a single line? Programming language design is nothing more than deciding the best way to deal with special cases. That even includes Lisp. - Mike -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
