On Fri, 30 May 2014 10:46:34 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 10:33 AM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
>> (By the way, ; won't work for a Python shell, because ;spam already is
>> valid Python syntax: it's an empty statement followed by the statement
>> spam, separated by a semicolon.)
>
> That's not really a problem, though. It's not going to stop you from
> doing something actually *useful*, and the fact that the semicolon could
> be syntactically valid isn't going to come into it, because the REPL
> would swallow it anyway.
The point is that *syntactically valid* Python statements should not
behave differently when running inside the shell or not. I thought
that ;statement was syntactically valid -- but I was wrong. The vanilla
CPython interactive interpreter gives a syntax error, as do IronPython
and Jython. I misinterpreted what I saw in IPython -- it's already doing
magic at the command line:
In [4]: len []
------> len([])
Out[4]: 0
In [5]: ;len []
------> len("[]")
Out[5]: 2
--
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/
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