Using something other than ';' to separate statements

[Jaime Wyant]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:26:20 -0500, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
> Jaime Wyant wrote:
> > Well, I'm embedding python in an old C console app.  This app uses a
> > lot of ; delimited records.
> >
> > I want to allow the execution of arbitrary python statements inside
> > some of these records.  I was hoping there was an easy way to set the
> > statement terminator.  I will simply make up a new terminator and do
> > some string substitution to turn my new terminator into python's ';'.
> 
> You refer to it here as a statement terminator, but in
> the first posting you called it a statement separator.
> I believe it is just a separator, not a terminator, and
> as such is not even required unless you need/want to have
> two statements on the same line.

Yeah, my thinking was that a separator implied terminator, because to
separate something has to have a beginning / ending.  Sorry for the
inconsistency.

Anyway, I did want to be able to string a handful of statements
together in one "string".  The python statements were one of the
semicolon delimited fields I'm working with -- which is where my
problem lied.

After goofing around with this idea, I've realized you can't be very
expressive with a bunch of python statements strung together.  My
biggest problem is that I can't figure out (i don't think you can),
how to do conditionals that are strung together:

# This won't work
if a > 5: print "a > 5";else print "Doh"

I've decided to just call a function from the semicolon delimited
record, using the return value in my `C' app...

> In all the tens of thousands of lines of Python code
> I've written, I don't believe I've ever used a single
> semicolon to separate two statements.
> 
> Perhaps you don't need them either...

Yeah, I tried to "make it work", but it just won't.  At least not in a
satisfactory way.

Thanks!
jw