* Steven D'Aprano (Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:07:17 +1000) > Thorsten Kampe wrote: > > * Thomas Jollans (Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:16:17 +0200) > >> Basically, it looks better, and is more readable. > > > > People tend to overlook the colon for the same reason they tend to > > forget to set the colon in the first place: > > a) it's a very weak marker in comparison to indentation and > > b) it looks like doubling the markup to them (colon plus indentation) > > I can't speak for others, but speaking for myself, I wonder whether this is > a difference between English speakers and non-English speakers?
It's not a difference between English and non-English speakers but the difference between a branch (if-then-else) and an enumeration (your example). > To me, as a native English speaker, leaving the colon out of a header > line, as follows below, just looks wrong. > [enumeration] > > Although the bullet list is indented, the header line "Our three weapons > are" looks like something is missing, as if I had started to write > something and forgotten to finish. It needs a colon to be complete: Sure, because it's an enumeration - and not a branch or loop. > An indented block on its own is surprising. It just hangs there, > with no connection to what was going on before. Why is it indented? > Is it connected to the previous sentence? In normal text: sure. You cannot "just indent" in Python as you like. Indentation always shows the connection. > >> A colon, in English like in Python, means that something follows > >> that is related to what was before the colon. So the colon makes it > >> abundantly clear to the human reader that a block follows, > > > > The block that follows makes it abundantly clear to the human reader > > that a block follows. > > But it's too late by then. You have to mentally backtrack. > > blah blah blah blah <statement is complete> > indented block <surprise the previous line wasn't complete> > > blah blah blah blah colon <statement is not complete> > indented block Source code is (unlike normal text) not read line by line. So you (at least I) don't have to backtrack from line 2 to line 1 because you see them both at the same time. Thorsten -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
