Perl has an often used feature where you can write a conditionalstatement in a form like:

statement if (condition);

(You can use unless too.)

I find this usage lurching because it's a dislocation in my flow ofthought. I start out reading the code thinking that the statement alwayshappens; then I get to the if and whoops, time to backtrack on myunderstanding.

The worst form of this is when the if is indented a lot, so it'salmost flush right with

Here's an interesting error message, somewhat slimmed down:

>>> object.__new__(dict)
TypeError: object.__new__(dict) is not safe, use dict.__new__()

At first blush this seems a peculiar artificial limitation: object isthe root of the Python type hierarchy and thus its __new__ is theroot version of creating new objects, so why doesn't it work?

Like the last peculiarity this