[Tutor] RE: Tutor digest, Vol 1 #3 - 7 msgs

[Alan Gauld]

> kidding!  The colons aren't syntactically necessary, and 
> you're experienced
> enough to at least inuit that.

Yes, That's possibly why I was confused. There seemed to 
be an essential syntactic element which served no 
practical use, so I kept asking - "What's it for?!"

Also I initially thought it was a line terminator
(like ; in Perl). My point was that nobody even *mentions* 
the colon in the existing tutorial or in Guido and Aarons 
book. Lutz gives it a passing mention in one sentence!

> iterations, what they discovered is that "begin/end" blocking 
> constructs
> confused complete newbies, but using indentation for blocking 
> didn't --
> provided that the block's opening line ended with a colon.  

Bizarre, but OK I can believe it... :-)

> though; over time I predict you'll grow quite fond of it.

After about 3 months I still miss it out. :-(

But at least I now recognise immediately what the 
problem is....

Thanks for all the responses, at least it got a thread going :-)

Alan G.