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From: john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: improve world by dropping languages with ;
Message-ID: <1991Feb25.173154.29456@linus.mitre.org>
Date: 25 Feb 91 17:31:54 GMT
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new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes:
> Actually, in my experience, most beginners get the indentation correct
> more often than the begin-end matching.  Why shouldn't the status
> depend on whitespace if it is more asthetically pleasing?  Other
> than *maybe* making it easier for automated sorce-transformation
> tools, why require that only a semicolon end a statement, and not a
> semicolor or EOL?

I don't want to require ANYTHING with respect to whitespace, except
that it be used to separate tokens, WHERE NECESSARY.  Don't get me
wrong, however, I have very strong intuitions about stylistic things
like indenting.  One of these intuitions is that it's impossible to
legislate style.

rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes:
> Probably people don't mind programming in a language where
> whitespace matters because they also write in natural languages
> where whitespace matters.

In written natural language, whitespace can HELP understanding, but it
is not REQUIRED for understanding.  (BTW, what about speech?)  Also,
you're clearly talking about western written languages, as opposed to
something like Japanese, which doesn't always use whitespace to
separate words.

On the other hand, I don't have strong intuitions about semicolons,
because I'm used to programming in languages like Lisp that don't
really have the concept of "statements".

--
John Burger                                               john@mitre.org

"You ever think about .signature files? I mean, do we really need them?"
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