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From: denelsbe@hatteras.cs.unc.edu (Kevin Denelsbeck)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: improve language by dropping ;
Message-ID: <1875@borg.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 25 Feb 91 16:47:59 GMT
References: <8507.27b91f9e@jetson.uh.edu> <8531@plains.NoDak.edu>
Sender: news@cs.unc.edu
Organization: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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In article <8531@plains.NoDak.edu> person@plains.NoDak.edu (Brett G. Person) writes:
>
>A BAD idea!  The semi-colon is there to denote the end of a particular piece
>of code.  I find it a lot easier to read a language that uses the semi-colon
>because it acts like a place holder for the little code-parser in my head.
>Try reading "efficient" BASIC code sometime.  
>

I disagree!  Semicolons, braces, and "anonymous" begin-end pairs are just a
lot of clutter, as far as I can see.  I'm willing to bet that most programmers
operate with the "one-command-per-line" mindset (except for a few little hacks
like putting a simple if-then or loop structure on one line) and that, in the
long run, eliminating semicolons and other such detritus makes for an easier-
to-read program.  In other words, I admire languages that rely on whitespace
for statement separators and end<command> statements for statement terminators.
It makes for a cleaner format and automatically does some documentation at the
same time (as opposed to the anonymous begin-ends or braces alluded to above).
It takes a little getting used to, but so do semicolons, and I think the
approach I mentioned is more intuitive.
	By the way, BASIC has come a long way, and I feel it's an unfairly
maligned language.  I'm not familiar with the details of True BASIC, but I
do know that a lot of dialects of BASIC have gone under some Algolization
and have some rather elegant features, such as conditional looping, additional
implicit types, etc.  The one I use, GFA BASIC for the Atari ST, has a lot of
Algolisms, as well as automatic code formatting (indenting, etc.) and some
C-like stuff to take advantage of incrementing vars and so on.  The compiler
generates some good code and the source is quite readable.
	Any other BASIC fans out there?

>-- 
>Brett G. Person
>North Dakota State University
>uunet!plains!person | person@plains.bitnet | person@plains.nodak.edu

Kev @ UNC