Are line continuations needed?

[Jeff Epler]

I would not miss \-continuations much.

I think you're mistaken about continuations "automatically with an
incomplete infix operator":
>>> 1 + 
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    1 + 
       ^
Did I misunderstand what you meant?

I would sorely miss lines continued due to the presence of nesting
expressions, like
    d = {
        'x': 1,
        'y': 2
    }
and
    if (x == 3
      and y == x * 4):
        return True
These kinds of continued lines are IMO easier to get right than
\-continuations, because those rely on absence of whitespace in a place
where the presence rarely makes a visible difference (backslash space
newline is not a continuation).

Jeff