• Pragma <eric.t.anderton gmail.com> May 06 2008
• Tom <tom nospam.com> May 06 2008

Pragma <eric.t.anderton gmail.com> writes:

Tomasz Sowinski Wrote:

 
 Just another feature thought. Never gonna happen, but still...
 
 What's the reason of having lines end with a semicolon? Anything else than a
legacy issue with C/C++?
 
 The only thing I can think of is having multiple statements in one line, but
that only makes code unreadable. Wouldn't getting rid of ; improve readability?
 


ECMAScript (JavaScript) allows this by making the terminating ';' optional, 
but you wind up with occasionally hard-to-find ambiguities as a result.  You
wind up falling back on using ';' everywhere as a habit just to avoid that
problem.  Requiring it, on the other hand, means that this problem never comes
up.

As as part of D's philosophy is to reduce to program errors by language design,
removing ';' would be somewhat against that goal.  Even making it optional
would be a bad move IMO.  So I think it's here to stay.

Tom <tom nospam.com> writes:

Pragma escribió:
 Tomasz Sowinski Wrote:
 
 Just another feature thought. Never gonna happen, but still...

 What's the reason of having lines end with a semicolon? Anything else than a
legacy issue with C/C++?

 The only thing I can think of is having multiple statements in one line, but
that only makes code unreadable. Wouldn't getting rid of ; improve readability?


 ECMAScript (JavaScript) allows this by making the terminating ';' optional, 
but you wind up with occasionally hard-to-find ambiguities as a result.  You
wind up falling back on using ';' everywhere as a habit just to avoid that
problem.  Requiring it, on the other hand, means that this problem never comes
up.
 
 As as part of D's philosophy is to reduce to program errors by language
design, removing ';' would be somewhat against that goal.  Even making it
optional would be a bad move IMO.  So I think it's here to stay.


I fully agree.


--
Tom;