Rob Gaddi <rgaddi@highlandtechnology.invalid>: > Not ugly, error-prone. The first is purely aestehetic, the second > actually matters. Let something as simple as a trailing space sneak in > after your backslash and your meaning changes. Blank line between; > same thing.
Never been bitten by that. Now, trying how emacs' indentation would react to such a syntax error, I notice: if some_condition \ and some_other_condition \ and some_final_condition: play_bingo() The misalignment is a surefire way to notice something is fishy (in all programming languages). > But the principle remains. Syntactic whitespace has its ups and downs > on the leading edge of the line, but at least it's visible there. On > the trailing end of the line it's actively inviting trouble in for > coffee and eggs. Continuation lines with backslashes are all over the place: make, bash, C, Python. I can't remember such accidents taking place. Now, *leading* whitespace causes all kinds of mischief including jagged diffs and syntax errors. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list