On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:31:33 -0800, James Stroud wrote: > Now, what happened to the whitespace idea here? This code seems very > unpythonic. I think : is great for slices and lamda where things go on one > line, but to require it to specify the start of a block of code seems a > little perlish.
It depends. Are you looking to eliminate punctuation entirely, or strike a proper balance? Yes, it's a loaded question, but yes, it reflects reality. Go look at a few hundred lines of Python code. Strip the colons off of the end. Barring the if bleh: something() one-liners*, it starts to look like a giant run on sentence to me. That's the native English speaker in me, but still, the historic trend was to add some punctuation as soon as technology made it non-burdensome. You don't *need* vowels in written text, either, but I see you and your language using them. Readability counts. ... practicality beats purity. Dropping the colon would just be getting silly. *: Where the colon *is* necessary; you need *something* to delimit the condition from the action, we've discussed this in the past but here's an example: if (a)(b)(c) can be if (a):(b)(c) if (a)(b):(c) ) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
