Why aren't colons optional?

[Marc Poulin]

In article <slrna4qsv3.s4s.mlh at vier.idi.ntnu.no>, "Magnus Lie Hetland"
<mlh at vier.idi.ntnu.no> wrote:

> 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...

I was not clear (that's my fault).

In Modula, you can write strings either way:
   "this is a string"
   ' "Yikes!" '

I was reacting to the phrase "there's more than one way to do it".
When I hear that, I immediately think of Perl. But when I look
at Python code, I don't think of Perl. I think of Modula and Occam.