On Sun, 8 Feb 2009 03:17:25 -0330 Riobard Zhan <yaogzhan@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6-Feb-09, at 8:41 PM, Mike Meyer wrote:

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That this consistency - ignoring trailing separators in list structures - can be misunderstood to be an optional ending separator in the degenerate case of a single statement is a good indication of why consistency isn't a trump property.

This is a very strange view of consistency to me. How many different kinds of list separators do we have? I can only think of semicolons and commas. I don't think semicolons are anything like commas. Non- trailing semicolons can be omitted, while non-trailing commas cannot, even if you put each item of [1,2,3] in separate lines.

Oops, I thought I missed a clause. The last sentence should be "Non- trailing semicolons can be omitted [if you put each statement in its own line], while non-trailing commas cannot, even if you put each item of [1,2,3] in separate lines." On 8-Feb-09, at 3:34 AM, Mike Meyer wrote:

You still don't understand the semantics of semicolons. Non-trailing semicolons are required, and can *not* be omitted. Try it and see:

bhuda$ python Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Nov 11 2008, 07:45:20) [GCC 4.2.1 20070719 [FreeBSD]] on freebsd7 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

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a = 1; b = 2 a = 1 b = 2 File "<stdin>", line 1 a = 1 b = 2 ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Only *trailing* semicolons - the one following the last statement in the list - can be omitted. Just like lists in list literals, in tuple literals (module zero & one element tuples), in dictionary literals, and as arguments to certain types of functions functions.

I'm really confused by your words. Here is a list of statements. a = 1; # non-trailing semicolon of the list of statements b = 2; # trailing semicolon of the list of statements Both semicolons can be omitted. Wait a minute... What do you mean by a "list" of statements? Is this one list of length 2, or two lists of length 1? a = 1 b = 2