[Python-ideas] allow line break at operators

[Matt Joiner]

+0.5

The "trailing \" workaround is nonobvious. Wrapping in () is noisy and
already heavily used by other syntactical structures. Since a final
':' is needed anyway, i think this would be great.

if a
  and b
  or c:
 do stuff()

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 11:02 PM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> On 11/08/2011 05:16, Chris Rebert wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 7:52 PM, Yingjie Lan<lanyjie at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> :And if we require {} then truly free indentation should be OK too! But
>>>
>>> :it wouldn't be Python any more.
>>>
>>> Of course, but not the case with ';'. Currently ';' is optional in
>>> Python,
>>
>> I think of it more as that Python deigns to permit semicolons.
>>
>>> But '{' is used for dicts. Clearly, ';' and '{' are different in
>>> magnitude.
>>>
>>> So the decision is: shall we change ';' from optional to mandatory
>>> to allow free line splitting?
>>
>> Hell no, considering that the sizable majority of lines *aren't*
>> split, which makes those semicolons completely redundant to their
>> accompanying newlines. We'd be practicing poor Huffman coding by
>> optimizing for the *un*common case. It would also add punctuational
>> noise to what is otherwise an amazingly clean and readable syntax.
>> Accidental semicolon omission is (IMO) the most irritating source of
>> syntax (and, inadvertently, sometimes other more serious) errors in
>> curly-braced programming languages.
>>
> +1
>>
>> Such a core syntax feature is not going to be changed lightly (or likely
>> ever).
>>
> I'm glad to hear that. :-)
>
> Although Python's use of indentation has its downside, we gain much
> more then we lose, IMHO.
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