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From: bright@dataio.UUCP (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: net.lang.mod2
Subject: Re: Aren't people fed up with semicolons yet?
Message-ID: <642@dataio.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 15-Apr-85 13:17:44 EST
Article-I.D.: dataio.642
Posted: Mon Apr 15 13:17:44 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Apr-85 01:31:22 EST
Reply-To: bright@dataio.UUCP (Walter Bright)
Organization: Data I/O Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 11

Semicolons are a very useful redundancy in the language. The reduncancy
makes error detection and recovery easier in the compiler.

With C, at least, one would have to make a newline a statement terminator,
or else one could have:

	a = 5 *p++ parsed as a=5; *p++; or as a=(5 * p++);

If a newline was made a statement terminator, then multi-line statements
would be a problem. All in all, for a free-format language, an explicit
termination character is nice.