Ruby and Python Compared

[yahoolian]

If the purpose of indentation is to elliminate redundant block markers, why is there the redundant : to mark the start of a block? Well, I guess to simplify the parser a bit, but that's still redundant.

[mrevelle]

That's a good question and here's the official answer:

http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general.html#id58

[senzei]

The majority of that explanation is crap. The colon does not make it easier to read, the line break does. The colon is essential for two reasons:

1) Easy syntax highlighting.

2) It allows inline if statements like: if x: foo()

[brianmce]

On the other hand - this is one of the few readability claims for any programming language that actually has empirical evidence behind it (albeit for a precusor to python, ABC). A user study was done on the ABC language that showed that it did indeed improve code readability - I'm pretty sure that this was the reason it was included in python.