The plain Python shell does respond to lines with only a comment and/or horizontal space with a continuation prompt. It only treats completely blank lines without any horizontal space specially:

>>>     
... # Indented blank line above; completely blank line below:
... 
>>> 

Meador: The documentation already says what you proposed: “NL tokens are generated when a logical line of code is continued over multiple physical lines” <https://docs.python.org/dev/library/tokenize.html#tokenize.NL>.

Thomas: It sounds like you actually want to differentiate newlines inside bracketed expressions from newlines outside of statements. I think this would require a new feature.

Also, I noticed that an escaped continued newline doesn’t seem to generate any token at all. Not sure if this is a bug or intended, but it does seem inconsistent with the other uses of the NL token.

$ ./python -btWall -m tokenize
1 + \
1,0-1,1:            NUMBER         '1'            
1,2-1,3:            OP             '+'            
1
2,0-2,1:            NUMBER         '1'            
2,1-2,2:            NEWLINE        '\n'           
3,0-3,0:            ENDMARKER      ''