The use of :

[Jeremy Bowers]

Re: The use of :

A two-fer.

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 10:28:42 +0800, Isaac To wrote:
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>>>>>> "Greg" == Greg Ewing <greg@cosc.cant erbury.ac.nz> writes:[/color][/color]
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> >> The only punctuation you *need* is whitespace. See Forth[/color][/color]
>
> Greg> You don't even need that... see FORTRAN. :-)[/color]

Well, I for one don't like reading large programs with no line feeds :-)
[color=blue]
> And you don't need everything else either... see this.
>
> http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/[/color]

I'm pretty sure if you remove all the whitespace and you remove all the
non-whitespace that you have indeed gotten a little too minimal :-)

[Paul Robson]

Re: The use of :

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 01:12:16 -0500, Jeremy Bowers wrote:
[color=blue]
> The only punctuation you *need* is whitespace. See Forth (I don't know
> if this is perfect but I'd bet the transform is simple),[/color]

: Announce ." Forth has a fair bit of punctuation" ;

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

Re: The use of :

In <41aa1abb$0$255 42$636a15ce@new s.free.fr>, bruno modulix wrote:
[color=blue]
> <please-someone-correct-me-if-i-am-wrong>
> In fact, from a purely technical POV, the ':' could have been omitted
> from the Python syntax, since indentation does the whole job of defining
> blocks. It's only here for readability AFAIK.
> </please-someone-correct-me-if-i-am-wrong>[/color]

The ':' serves as a very good hint to "python aware" text editors to
automagically indent the next line after hitting return.

Ciao,
Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

[Nick Coghlan]

Re: The use of :

BJörn Lindqvist wrote:[color=blue]
> Because it contains more non-significant symbols (, ), { and } that
> "steal" the programmers attention. But consider
>
> def f(x, y, z)
> print x, y, z
>
> to
>
> def f(x, y, z):
> print x, y, z
>
> IMHO, the colon-less variant is more readable than the one with the colon.[/color]

Except that it is quite acceptable to do the following:

def f(x, y, z,
long_func_arg_n ame):
long_func_arg_n ame(x, y, z)


def f(x, y, z,
long_func_arg_n ame)
long_func_arg_n ame(x, y, z)

The colons do a decent job of flagging the beginning of suites, mainly because
of Python general lack of *other* punctuation (e.g. the colon would be entirely
ineffective at improving readability if every line ended with a semi-colon).

Cheers,
Nick.