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From: MERRIMAN@ccavax.camb.com (George Merriman -- CCA/NY)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Semicolons (Re: Low-Rent Syntax)
Message-ID: <31814.26e57166@ccavax.camb.com>
Date: 6 Sep 90 01:43:01 GMT
References: <9008202341.AA06543@llama.ingres.com> <4032@rtifs1.UUCP> <1990Aug29.140407.28378@maths.nott.ac.uk> <2753@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk>
Sender: compilers-sender@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: George Merriman -- CCA/NY <MERRIMAN@ccavax.camb.com>
Organization: Cambridge Computer Associates, Inc.
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In article <2753@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk>, liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts) writes:
> [I have seen many reports that the semicolon as separator, as in Algol 60
> and Pascal, is much harder to get right than the semicolon as terminator,
> as in PL/I and C. -John]

I find it much easier to deal with semicolon-as-separator  (actually
semicolon-as-sequence-operator) if I use a coding convention I first
noticed in a E. Dykstra paper:

	While somesuch_boolean
    	    begin
      	      statement_1
    	    ; statement_2
    	    ; statement_3
    	    end

While I find this easy for me, and find the idea of
semicolon-as-sequence-operator very helpful, I don't dare use it in any real
code because the next poor sod will probably have no idea what I'm up to!
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