[Python-ideas] A suggestion for Python 3 vs Python 2

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 08:42:57PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

> A few months ago I came up with a working "call statement" implementation
> that would allow the parens to be omitted from all simple calls, not just
> print: http://bugs.python.org/issue18788
> 
> That shows such an approach is technically feasible, but it also makes it
> clear there are major readability issues if the LHS is allowed to be an
> arbitrary expression.

IPython has had this feature for a while:

In [1]: len []
------> len([])
Out[1]: 0

As IPython is attempting to be an interactive shell rather than just a 
REPL, that makes a certain amount of sense, but it does lead to some 
unfortunate situations:

In [2]: len [] + len []
------> len([] + len [])
------------------------------------------------------------
   File "<ipython console>", line 1
     len([] + len [])
                   ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax


-- 
Steven