[Python-3000] PEP 3125 -- a modest proposal (original) (raw)

Alexandre Vassalotti avassalotti at acm.org
Tue May 8 16:03:42 CEST 2007

On 5/8/07, Raymond Hettinger <python at rcn.com> wrote:

If you're in the mood to propose something radical, how about dropping the colon altogether, leaving indention as the sure reliable cue and cleaning-up the appearance of code in a new world where colons are also being used for annotation as well as slicing:

def f(x: xtype, y: type) result = [] for i, elem in enumerate(x) if elem < 0 result.append(y[:i]) else result.append(y[i:]) return result It looks very clean to my eyes.

This proposal is surely doomed is advance. If I remember well the trailing colon comes from Python's precursor, ABC. They realized it was not necessary for the parser but it did make the programs more readable for humans.

Would it be a good idea, to continue this thread on Python-ideas? I doubt such changes will be accepted, since we are now past the PEP deadline for changes to the core language.

-- Alexandre

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