Maybe. We must remember that Python was designed at the very end of the 80s so what was normal for developers back then could be unexpected nowadays. An example: the self in Python's OO is a C pointer to struct of data and function pointers. It should be perfectly clear to anybody writing OO code in plain C at the time (rising hand.) Five years later new OO languages (Java, Ruby) kept self inside the classes but hide it in method definitions.
But Python 3 was designed in the 2000s and had many breaking changes. Seems like they could have changed this behavior with that version.
I assumed it was borrowed from shell, where everything can just be put next to eachother since it’s all text.