Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcrware!jejones
From: jejones@mcrware.UUCP (James Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Algol-style semicolons (was Re: What makes a language successful)
Keywords: semicolons, statements, end
Message-ID: <868@mcrware.UUCP>
Date: 14 Dec 88 16:03:43 GMT
References: <1126@etive.ed.ac.uk> <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: jejones@mcrware.UUCP (James Jones)
Organization: Microware Systems Corp., Des Moines, Iowa
Lines: 26

I never could understand what the difficulty is with Algol-style semicolons.
Maybe it was the way it was explained to me (thank you, Professor Feyock,
wherever you are!).  In Algol, semicolons *separate* statements.  The glyph
"end" is *not* a statement; it and "begin" serve the same purpose as paren-
theses, and indeed, Algol 68 makes this even more obvious by allowing the
use of parentheses in place of begin and end if one wishes.

(By the way, not all statements in C are terminated with semicolons; otherwise,
there wouldn't be all that grief over

#define woof(x, y, z) {/* various statements */}
...

	if (p)
		woof(a, b, c);
	else
		/* etc. */

and the world would be a happier place, but then, isn't saving keystrokes
the true goal of all C programmers? :-)

People don't seem to have trouble with the convention that in English, items
in a list are separated by commas, so why do they have trouble with Algol
semicolon usage?  I don't know.

		James Jones