Py3K idea: why not drop the colon?

[Georg Brandl]

Ron Adam wrote:
> Georg Brandl wrote:
>> Ron Adam wrote:
>>> Michael Hobbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> The same problem that is solved by not having to type parens around the 
>>>> 'if' conditional, a la C and its derivatives. That is, it's unnecessary 
>>>> typing to no good advantage, IMHO. I was coding in Ruby for several 
>>>> months and got very comfortable with just typing the if conditional and 
>>>> hitting return, without any extra syntax. When I came back to Python, I 
>>>> found that I felt annoyed every time I typed the colon, since it 
>>>> obviously isn't required. The FAQ says that the colon increases 
>>>> readability, but I'm skeptical. The indentation seems to provide more 
>>>> than enough of a visual clue as to where the if conditional ends.
> 
>>> I'm not sure why '\'s are required to do multi-line before the colon.
>> 
>> Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
>> 
>> Georg
> 
> A bit of a circular answer.
> 
>      Why the rule? -> So not to break the rule?

You proposed to allow leaving off line continuation '\' only in the
"if", "for" and "while" headers. This is a special case in my eyes.

> I would guess this probably is more applicable in this case.
> 
>      Explicit is better than implicit.

Of course, this always applies :)

Georg