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From: wall@decwrl.UUCP (David Wall)
Newsgroups: net.lang.mod2
Subject: Re: Aren't people fed up with semicolons yet?
Message-ID: <1694@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Apr-85 20:20:58 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1694
Posted: Tue Apr 16 20:20:58 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Apr-85 04:46:59 EST
Organization: DEC Western Research Lab, Los Altos, CA
Lines: 17

Jack Jansen writes:

> Also, as another argument: semicolons provide a bit of
> redundency, and redundancy is always nice, since it helps
> you detect errors at compile time, in stead of at runtime.
> If a feature decreases my typing-time by 10% and increaes
> debugging time by 10%, I don't want the feature.

I don't mind semicolons myself, but don't get the impression
that they turn runtime errors into compile-time errors, at
least not in keyword-including statement-oriented strongly-typed
languages like Modula-2.  The Modula-2 grammar is perfectly
unambiguous without the semicolons.  One thing that having
semicolons does, though, is allow the parser to recover from
syntax errors quicker, so you can get a greater number and
proportion of correct compile-time errors in a single
compilation.  This is not a benefit to be sneezed at.