The docs say: A suite can be one or more semicolon-separated simple statements on the same line as the header, following the header's colon, or it can be one or more indented statements on subsequent lines. Only the latter form of suite can contain nested compound statements; the following is illegal, mostly because it wouldn't be clear to which if clause a following else clause would belong:
if test1: if test2: print x What's the rest of the reason? Is it an LL(1) parser limitation? The error came to my attention through: with nested(open(args[0], "rb"), open(args[1], "rb")) as (banner, pfaids): if outfile_path is None: report(sys.stdout, reconcile(banner, pfaids)) else: with open(outfile_path, "w") as outfile: report(outfile, reconcile(banner, pfaids)) Instead I must write: with nested(open(args[0], "rb"), open(args[1], "rb")) as (banner, pfaids): if outfile_path is None: report(sys.stdout, reconcile(banner, pfaids)) else: with open(outfile_path, "w") as outfile: report(outfile, reconcile(banner, pfaids)) There's nothing terribly wrong with it, I guess, but it does look "hairier" when really it isn't. Moreover, "invalid syntax" is a bit terse--but probably it's not worth it to complicate the grammar just for a better error message. Finally, any ideas for a prettier version of the above snippet? -- Neil Cerutti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list