The colon remains syntactically necessary in some cases, particularly to
disambiguate cases involving one-lining (no block involved). Stupid
example: If the colon is optional, what does:
if d +d
mean? Is it a test of the value of d, followed by invoking the unary plus
operator as a one-liner (that is, was it "if d: +d")? Or is it testing d +
d, and opening a block on the next line ("if d + d:")?
On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 6:15 PM Random832 <random...@fastmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2020, at 18:15, David Mertz wrote:
> > For what it's worth, after 20+ years of using Python, forgetting the
> > colon for blocks remains the most common error I make by a fairly wide
> > margin. Of course, once I see the error message—even being not all that
> > descriptive of the real issue—I immediately know what to fix too.
>
> What if the colon were made optional, with an eye to perhaps eventually no
> longer using it as the preferred style for new code?
>
> We had a post a while ago about the possibility of using the lack of a
> colon as an implicit line continuation (like with parentheses, e.g. "if
> a\nand b:", and this was (reasonably) rejected. But if a line beginning as
> a compound statement and ending without a colon is *never* going to have a
> valid meaning as something else... what's the point of the colon,
> otherwise? Seems like just grit on the screen.
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