Python Newbie

[piterrr.dolinski at gmail.com]

> > if (some statement):		# short form
> >
> > rather than
> >
> > if (some statement == true):	# long form
> 
> 
> What all those ugly brackets are for?
> 

Mark,

Back in the day when C was king, or take many newer long established languages (C#, Java), the use of () has been widespread and mandated by the compilers. I have never heard anyone moan about the requirement to use parentheses. Now come Python in which parens are optional, and all of a sudden they are considered bad and apparently widely abandoned. Do you really not see that code with parens is much more pleasing visually? I could understand someone's reluctance to use parens if they are very new to programming and Pythons is their first language. But my impression here is that most group contributors are long-time programmers and have long used () where they are required. Again, I'm really surprised the community as a whole ignores the programming "heritage" and dumps the parens in a heartbeat.

Peter