Py3K idea: why not drop the colon?

Robert Kern robert.kern at gmail.com
Thu Nov 9 17:28:44 EST 2006


Tim Chase wrote:
> A few arbitrary warts per-dictum of BDFL are fine though...it 
> still looks much cleaner compared to PHP & Perl ;-)

Well, it's neither arbitrary nor simply the preference of the BFDL. The ABC
project actually did empirical experiments with programmers to find that code
comprehension improved by adding the colon.

Here's a post from Uncle Timmy mentioning it:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/525480d0caa61b7f/8d568e684d653003?lnk=st&q=group%3Acomp.lang.python+ABC+colon+experiment&rnum=2#8d568e684d653003

Unfortunately, my Google-fu has not located an actual paper. It might be in here
somewhere:

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/publications.html

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco




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