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Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:16:54 -0700
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Subject: Re: allow line break at operators
From: Chris Rebert <clp2@rebertia.com>
To: Yingjie Lan <lanyjie@yahoo.com>
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On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 7:52 PM, Yingjie Lan <lanyjie@yahoo.com> wrote:
> :And if we require {} then truly free indentation should be OK too! But
>
> :it wouldn't be Python any more.
>
> Of course, but not the case with ';'. Currently ';' is optional in Python,

I think of it more as that Python deigns to permit semicolons.

> But '{' is used for dicts. Clearly, ';' and '{' are different in magnitude.
>
> So the decision is: shall we change ';' from optional to mandatory
> to allow free line splitting?

Hell no, considering that the sizable majority of lines *aren't*
split, which makes those semicolons completely redundant to their
accompanying newlines. We'd be practicing poor Huffman coding by
optimizing for the *un*common case. It would also add punctuational
noise to what is otherwise an amazingly clean and readable syntax.
Accidental semicolon omission is (IMO) the most irritating source of
syntax (and, inadvertently, sometimes other more serious) errors in
curly-braced programming languages.

Such a core syntax feature is not going to be changed lightly (or likely ever).

Cheers,
Chris