[Python-ideas] Making colons optional?

[Bruce Leban]

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 11:58 PM, Riobard Zhan <yaogzhan at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 8-Feb-09, at 3:50 AM, Bruce Leban wrote:
>
>  You can not generalize that far. Most programming languages require commas
>> (notable exceptions include Lisp and Tcl), but Python is the only language
>> that requires trailing colons.
>>
>> Nope. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
>>
>
> Just checked. Smalltalk's colons seem to have completely different
> semantics. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they appear to be at the end of
> every keyword, including ifTrue and ifElse.
>
Your statement that no programming language used trailing colons is simply
false. I and many others have said that colons and semicolons have
completely different semantics as well and you have chosen to ignore that.


>  Clearly the use of the specific semicolon character is confusing you. So
>> let's replace it with a better symbol: \n as in this example:
>>
>>  for i in x: foo(i) \n bar(i+1)
>>
>> Sure a \n is optional at the end of any line because a blank line is
>> always allowed. So what?
>>
>
> What's the point you are trying to make?
>

The point is that the \n token and the : token have different semantics
entirely. The \n token is used to separate statements on a single line. You
seem to think that they are related because they look similar and now they
don't.

One more final point: in some languages, the semicolon is a statement
TERMINATOR as it is in C and in others it is a statement SEPARATOR as it is
in Pascal. I think your time would be better served by working to convince
the Pascal people and the C people to reconcile that inconsistency than this
discussion.

--- Bruce
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