Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!bionet!ig!arizona!gudeman
From: gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What makes a language successfu
Message-ID: <8374@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 15 Dec 88 03:28:27 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 25

In article  <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu> carroll@s.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>... Having to remember 'put a ; at the end of a statement
>*unless* it's just before an END, in which case you put it on the end of
>the previous statement' is for me much harder than 'put a ; at the end of
>a statement', as in C. I don't like non-local syntax changes like that.

Far be it from me to defend Pascal, but I would like to point out that
you are misquoting the rule.  There is no rule about puting semicolons
at the end of statements, the rule is that semicolons go between
statements, just like comma's go between arguments to a function.  The
BEGIN and END are brackets like parenthesis.

Example: let S be a statement, and E be an expression:

                BEGIN  S  ;  S  ;  S  END        corresponds to
funtion_name      (    E  ,  E  ,  E   )

I'm not saying this is the best way to do things, just that it is
reasonably intuitive if you look at it right.

					David Gudeman

					    Department of Computer Science
gudeman@arizona.edu			    Gould-Simpson Science Building
{allegra,cmcl2,ihnp4,noao}!arizona!gudeman  The University of Arizona
602-621-2858				    Tucson, AZ 85721