Py3K idea: why not drop the colon?

[Michael Hobbs]

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
>   

Eh? So multi-line strings are special enough to create a new syntax, 
like, say, triple-quoted strings? Very long expressions aren't special 
enough to create a special backslash token to continue the expression on 
the next line? Multiple short expressions aren't special enough to 
create a special semi-colon token to combine them on a single line?

Programming language design is nothing more than deciding the best way 
to deal with special cases. That even includes Lisp.

- Mike