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Does Python Cuddle?

In one of my semi-regular Complain About Perl sessions with a coworker, we found ourselves looking at the Perl Style Guide. Something caught my eye almost immediately:

• Uncuddled elses.

This is apparently one of Larry Wall’s stylistic preferences for Perl code, which means the creator of Perl is on record as being anti-cuddles, which is just one more reason for me to despise Perl. I was led naturally to wonder whether Python is a pro-cuddle language. But what are cuddled elses? The venerable c2 wiki comes to the rescue:

In an “if-then-else” statement, the following are examples of “cuddled” and “uncuddled” elses in C:

|  /* cuddled "else" */  |  /* uncuddled "else" */   
|  if (x > 0) {          |  if (x > 0) {   
|      x += y;           |      x += y;   
|  } else {              |  }   
|      y += x;           |  else {   
|  }                     |      y +=x;   
                         |  }   

Well, Python doesn’t have braces at all. But thanks to its syntactically significant indentation, its if/else statements more closely resemble the lefthand example than the one on the right. Because of this, I propose that Python can be said to have phantom cuddles for its elses. Rest easy, Python fans. My tergiversation puts Python firmly in the pro-cuddle camp.