Elsewhere you mention the "if it looks like a function" rule. That was created when it was figured out that putting a space between "print" and "(" sometimes got a different interpretation from "print(". At the time this was discovered, I recalled the mood of the discussion being somewhat "well, that code is ugly, but not so ugly that it should break things so we should probably fix it".

So we have multiple bugs associated with this style. It isn't widely used (otherwise these bugs would have been found sooner) and isn't widely tested. My suggestion is to not use it.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")