Py3K idea: why not drop the colon?

[Michael Hobbs]

Carsten Haese wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-11-11 at 23:18 -0800, Doug wrote:
>   
>> Michael Hobbs wrote:
>>     
>>> I think the colon could be omitted from every type of compound
>>> statement: 'if', 'for', 'def', 'class', whatever. Am I missing anything?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> - Mike
>>>       
>> It is a very good idea as the colon is technically redundant (not
>> necessary for parsing, aside from one liners) and actually hurts
>> readability (and writeability).  The "evidence" people cite for the
>> advantage of using a colon is research done by users of the ABC
>> language, python's predecessor.  They forget that A) that was like 20
>> years ago,
>>     
>
> Research being old does not automatically invalidate it. Old research is
> invalidated by newer research that invalidates it.
>
>   
No, old research does is not automatically invalidated, but 
out-of-context research is. I'm sure there's research somewhere proving 
that code written in ALL UPPERCASE is preferable, since it makes 
punched-cards easier to read by humans. Python 1.0 may have been a nice 
language for "newbies", with a lot of similarities to ABC, but there has 
been a lot of evolution since then. Sure, it's still very easy to teach 
basic Python, but if you're concerned about readability, take a look at 
any real-world Python app or library. You'll find it's filled with 
things such as "__getattr__", "__repr__", "__nonzero__", and 
"super(MyClass, self).__init__()". Hardly newbie stuff.

I think waving the banner of ABC simplicity in the context of Py3K is 
about as applicable as complaining that an RSS aggregator isn't written 
in assembly. (An RSS aggregator is so far beyond being CPU-bound that 
it's pointless to argue which language it should be written in.)

- Mike