"Russ P." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] |. Well, it wouldn't be a bad idea for Python to do | what I thought it did, *plus* what I said it ought to do.
A line ending in an operator is ambiguous in that it *could* indicate that the programmer intends to continue on the next line while it also could indicate that the programmer forgot to finish before hitting return, or that something got erased but not replaced. Moreover, the second possibility is actual (it actually happens) and not just theoretical. Moreover, the next line realistically could 'complete' the incomplete line 'by accident', so that the syntax bug would not get flagged. In such situations, some might lean toward the plausible guess choice, but Guido leans in the direction of choosing the bug interpretation. So he included the '\' mechanism. It is already used in strings to mean "do not take the next char literally", so having it mean "do not take the following end-of-line literally" is only a tiny step. Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
