parentheses allows it to span multiple lines other rules there are few other points to mention with regard to statement delimiters although it is uncommonyou can terminate statement with semicolon--this convention is sometimes used to squeeze more than one simple (noncompoundstatement onto single line alsocomments and blank lines can appear anywhere in filecomments (which begin with characterterminate at the end of the line on which they appear few special cases here' what continuation line looks like using the open syntactic pairs rule just described delimited constructssuch as lists in square bracketscan span across any number of linesl ["good""bad""ugly"open pairs may span lines this also works for anything in parentheses (expressionsfunction argumentsfunction headerstuplesand generator expressions)as well as anything in curly braces (dictionaries andin and set literals and set and dictionary comprehensionssome of these are tools we'll study in later but this rule naturally covers most constructs that span lines in practice if you like using backslashes to continue linesyou canbut it' not common practice in pythonif = and = and = and =gprint('olde'backslashes allow continuations because any expression can be enclosed in parenthesesyou can usually use the open pairs technique instead if you need your code to span multiple lines--simply wrap part of your statement in parenthesesif ( = and = and = and = )print('new'but parentheses usually do tooand are obvious in factbackslashes are generally frowned on by most python developersbecause they're too easy to not notice and too easy to omit altogether in the followingx is assigned with the backslashas intendedif the backslash is accidentally omittedthoughx is assigned insteadand no error is reported (the + is valid expression statement by itselfin real program with more complex assignmentthis could be the source of very nasty bug: + omitting the makes this very differentpython syntax revisited