line continuation for lines ending in "and" or "or"

[Terry Reedy]

"Russ P." <Russ.Paielli at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:0d723e6d-f81b-4545-b406-fc60b20c5433 at u6g2000prc.googlegroups.com...
|. Well, it wouldn't be a bad idea for Python to do
| what I thought it did, *plus* what I said it ought to do.

A line ending in an operator is ambiguous in that it *could* indicate that 
the programmer intends to continue on the next line while it also could 
indicate that the programmer forgot to finish before hitting return, or 
that something got erased but not replaced.  Moreover, the second 
possibility is actual (it actually happens) and not just theoretical. 
Moreover, the next line realistically could 'complete' the incomplete line 
'by accident', so that the syntax bug would not get flagged.

In such situations, some might lean toward the plausible guess choice, but 
Guido leans in the direction of choosing the bug interpretation.  So he 
included the '\' mechanism.  It is already used in strings to mean "do not 
take the next char literally", so having it mean "do not take the following 
end-of-line literally" is only a tiny step.

Terry Jan Reedy