&#62; As a Pythonista I have no idea what the Ruby snippet is doing.<p>Fair enough. Arguing over beauty is silly anyway, I just wanted to point out that the entire thing is entirely subjective.<p>&#62; The Python 3 version is using a function annotation.<p>Thanks, checking out PEP 3107 now. I've always seen annotations done with the @annotation syntax like the Python 2 snippet has.