New Python Syntax -- Guido's Reply

Chris Hoffmann (choffman@vicorp.com)
Thu, 26 May 94 18:28:13 EDT

I'd like to second George's modification to Guido's proposal. If a
block is going to be ended with "end", I'd prefer that the start of
the block somehow indicate this. Given this, however, I don't
particularly care whether this is done by eliminating the ":", or by
replacing it or augmenting it with a keyword ("do", for example).

I'm one of those whose primary concern with this issue has been the
ability to make sense of a poorly formatted bits of code. Most likely
this code is illegally indented either because it was entered
interactively in a brain-dead widget, or because it was automatically
generated. I don't really mind taking this output and running it
through a pretty-printer filter to get the indentation right before
sending it on to the interpreter. Guido's proposal will let me do
this.

Having the opening of a delimited block distinguished from a
non-delimited block seems to me to give the pretty-printer more
information to go on and reduce (although not eliminate) the number of
ambiguous pieces of code. It also just "feels" better to me.

So, although part of me would like Python syntax to allow whitespace
to be ignored in certain circumstances, I'll be happy with
officially-sanctioned open- and close-delimiter statements.

Chris

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