Ron Adam wrote: > LOL, of course it would. I would expect that too after a suitable amount of > 'brain washing', oops, I mean training and conditioning. ;-) > Trust me, my brain is quite filthy and doesn't wash easily. I do appreciate aesthetics, which is why still stay with Python, even after programming in Ruby for several months. I've used Java/C/C++ for years, yet I make no complaint about the lack of static typing in Python. Even so, I'd like to think that I know a good thing when I see it. > The point is what is more natural to "read" with a minimum amount of > explanation. I would think for most people who are learning programming for > the > first time, it is things that resemble things they already know. Such as > outlining with colons. > > Leaving the colon out probably would feel more natural for writing once you > get > used to it. After all it is a bit less typing. But I don't think it would > be > the most readable choice for most people. It's probably a trade off, > readability vs writability. Another python development guideline is to favor > readability over writability on the presumption we tend to write code once, > but > read code many times. > Not to repeat myself from an earlier post, but any pretense that Python's primary objective is readability went out the window with the invention of such constructs as "__del__", "__repr__", and "super(MyClass, self).__init__()". There are obviously other goals to the language's development that inspired these constructs and override the priority of readability.
> Here's an alternative test. Write a program to remove all the end of line > colons from pythons library and then write another separate program to put > them > back in. Will it miss any? will it pass the python test suite? > I just may take you up on that. ;-) Not for a few days, though. Not enough time right now. - Mike -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
