[Python-ideas] Syntax: 'return: ...' expressions

[Andrew Barnert]

On Jan 5, 2015, at 4:47, Yawar Amin <yawar.amin at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know, it's the Python programmer's dreaded multi-line expression. Note
> here that I'm not proposing any change to indentation rules.

But that _is_ a new indentation rule.

You're using multiple statements inside parentheses, indented as if they were a block. (This is effectively just a suggestion for brace syntax, and I'm not sure what the return adds to it that you couldn't get just from brace syntax. You also seem to have invented a rule that a sequence of statements has the value of the last statement as its value. Which requires first inventing a rule that gives values to statements. I'll assume you wanted to go with the same rule the interactive interpreter uses to display a last value--an expression statement has its expression's value, and any other kind of statement has None?)

You're assuming that parentheses have an existing indentation rule that you can piggyback on, but they don't. Superficially, parenthesis continuation may look similar to block indentation, but it's not at all the same. Compare:

    >>> (spam,
    ... eggs)
    >>> if spam:
    ... eggs

The first is a perfectly valid tuple display; the second raises an IndentationError. Because suites begin with a new indent, but paren continuation just concatenates the lines together.

So, unless you're suggesting that any free-form sequence of statements is now legal within parens, you must be inventing a new indent rule to use within those parens.

There are also problems with nesting indents and colons. Note that compound statements (like if) include either by an inline simple statement list, or an indented block of one or more statements. This means you can't have two possibly-indenting colons on the same line. Unless your new expression can only be used in simple statements, and a simple statement with your new expression can't be used in an inline simple statement list, you're changing the way colons and indents are parsed by statements.

Finally, are you sure your new return: isn't ambiguous without look ahead or context? When the parser reads "if spam: return", is it starting a return simple statement, or an expression statement that starts with a return expression? Have you tried actually writing out the grammar?