dthable's Journal: [Python] What's with all the semicolons?

I'm looking at the /. journal extraction script written in Python and I keep seeing lots of lines that end in semicolons. Example:

        def getIndexItem(self):
                # create a summary of the entry
                digest = self.body[:self.DIGEST_LEN].replace('\n', '');
                digest = self.HTML_STRIP.sub('', digest);
                digest = digest.replace('>', '').replace('

When I learned about Python and started to work with it, I was told not to use the semicolons. In fact, I thought that was illegal. Is the parser just throwing them away? Does it have any purpose other than making those C programmers happy?

What happens to them

[Com2Kid]

;'s separate multiple statements on a single line.

In the examples you showed, the second statement is just blank. Since blank statements are always allowed... yah, they pretty much get dropped. :)

With how little optimization Python does though, I wonder if there is a noticeable performance difference!