Guido van Rossum:

I think I'd prefer (if <expr> then <expr> else <expre>)

In isolation, (if .. then ... else) is an improvement, but I'm not sure it should be viewed in isolation. At one point, you wanted to strengthen the distinction between statements and expressions. Is that still true? x = (if y then y.val else default) x = (if y: y.val else: default) If any statement can become an expression, that could be very useful. There are times when it would be convenient to just grab the newly created function (def replacing lambda) or class, or the newly imported module. The distinction between exec and eval starts to look increasingly arbitrary as well. But if everything becomes expression-able, people *will* start to use parentheses instead of indentation. -jJ