Why aren't colons optional?

[Magnus Lie Hetland]

In article <3c4cd93a$0$2202$7586b60c at news.frii.com>, Marc Poulin wrote:
>In article <u4oc4g84pfuv4d at news.supernews.com>, "John Roth"
><johnroth at ameritech.net> wrote:
>
>>> I've also always found the interchangability of ' and " to be a bit
>>> amusing.  Seems like it was just a bone to throw to the "there's more
>> than
>>> one way to do it" camp.  
>
>Thus spake Niklaus Wirth:
>
>  $string = '"'{character}'"' | "'"{character}"'".
>        -- Programming in Modula-2 (3rd ed., 1985), p. 15

This seems to lose some of the point of the duality in Python, namely
that double-quoted strings can contain single quotes and vice versa...

--
Magnus Lie Hetland                                  The Anygui Project
http://hetland.org                                  http://anygui.org