Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!Ozona!chase
From: chase@Ozona.orc.olivetti.com (David Chase)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-style semicolons
Message-ID: <34366@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 15 Dec 88 23:47:06 GMT
References: <1126@etive.ed.ac.uk> <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <868@mcrware.UUCP> <8008@aw.sei.cmu.edu> <GARY.88Dec15142623@milo.mcs.clarkson.edu>
Sender: news@oliveb.olivetti.com
Reply-To: chase@Ozona.UUCP (David Chase)
Organization: Olivetti Research Center, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 30

In article <GARY.88Dec15142623@milo.mcs.clarkson.edu> gary@milo.mcs.clarkson.edu (Gary Levin) writes:
>In article <8008@aw.sei.cmu.edu> firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes:
>>   The best, in my opinion, is to have the semicolon optional: a newline
>>   will terminate the statement if possible.

>Further, I then tried to write this as
>
>	   x := (a0+a1+a2
>		+a3+a4+a5);
>
>and I was informed that I was missing a right parenthesis after a2
>(and before the inserted semicolon).  Note that Icon would correctly
>handle the case of the trailing + as Firth wrote his example.

A flaw in Icon's implementation of optional terminators is hardly a
condemnation of optional terminators; other parsers have been getting
it right for years.  I agree rather completely with Mr. Firth's
message; I've used a language with optional semicolon syntax, and
liked it very much.  It is astounding how much the little things often
matter.  (It's also astounding what horrible parsers some compilers
have.)

I should add that the trailing operator to indicate continuation
rapidly becomes a part of your style when working in such a language.

One actually wonders, after reading the keystroke-minimizing arguments
on "=/:=" vs "==/=" in Kernighan and Ritchie, why they made semicolons
mandatory.  BCPL didn't have them.  They could have saved one whole
character per statement.  Enquiring minds want to know.

David