> GvR got it right when he discarded the superfluous semicolons from the ends > of statements--and then he ADDS superfluous colons to the ends of control > statements? It will probably be as much of a shock to you as it was to me > when I learned after studying parsing that colons, semicolons, "then"'s and > "do"'s, etc., are simply noise tokens that serve no purpose except to > clutter up the source.
Some argue that the colon is a useful visual cue that aids in readability and that "explicit is better than implicit". I think one can feel either way about it. For my part, I prefer to have colons at that point, because it serves as a mental primer that a certain type of block follows. Semi-colons at the end of statements don't seem to provide any mental priming for me that can't better be served by a line break. > As for enforced indentation, back in the late 60's when I was a programming > newbie I remember thinking how cool it would be to just indent the > statements controlled by for loops (we didn't have none of them fancy while > loops in FORTRAN back then! :-) ) Not too long after that I saw the havoc > that a buggy editor could wreak on nicely-formatted source. :-( Formatting > held hostage to a significant, invisible whitespace char? An inevitable > accident waiting to happen! Not good, Guido; not good at all. First, why would you tolerate a buggy editor? I've had my share of challenges in learning Python, but indentation problems would be about 403rd down on the list. A simple indentation error is shown in my editor that immediately gets fixed. No havoc at all. And I also know that every piece of Python code I ever get from others *has* to be readable (at least in terms of the very visually helpful indented blocks). Che Che > > That'll do for starters. :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
