"Paddy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>I was just perusing a Wikipedia entry on the "off side rule" at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-side_rule .
> It says that the colon in Python is purely for readability, and cites
> our FAQ entry
> http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general.html#why-are-colons-required-fo...
> .
> However, near the top of the Alternatives section, it states that for C
> type, curly braces using languages:
> "An advantage of this is that program code can be automatically
> reformatted and neatly indented without fear of the block structure
> changing".
>
> Thinking about it a little, it seems that a colon followed by
> non-indented code that has just been pasted in could also be used by a
> Python-aware editor as a flag to re-indent the pasted code.
>
> Tell me it is not so, or I will be editing the Wikipedia page I think.
>
> - Paddy.
>
No, the ambiguity comes in when you have a nested construct within another
nested construct. Here is some (fake) code where all the indentation was
lost after pasting through a badly-behaved newsreader (this is NOT real
code, I know that it wont really run, I'm just trying to demonstrate the
indentation issue):
while x:
a = 100
if b > 3:
a += 1
b += 1
Here are some valid indented versions:
while x:
a = 100
if b > 3:
a += 1
b += 1
while x:
a = 100
if b > 3:
a += 1
b += 1
while x:
a = 100
if b > 3:
a += 1
b += 1
while x:
a = 100
if b > 3:
a += 1
b += 1
The colons alone are not sufficient to tell us which is correct.
-- Paul
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