Why can function definitions only use identifiers, and not attribute references or any other primaries?

[Marco Mariani]

Jeremy Banks wrote:

> I've read those discussion before, but somehow never made the
> connection between those and this. I'll give that article a read, it
> probably details exactly the perspective I'm looking for. Thank you!

You could also read this:

http://unlimitednovelty.com/2009/03/indentation-sensitivity-post-mortem.html

The author is writing a language for the Erlang VM inspired by Python 
and Ruby. He had some trouble (at the grammar level) in keeping both 
"indentation working like in python" (dear to Guido and many of us) and 
"anonymous blocks" (dear to functional languages).
So he got braces and was happy :-)