Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What makes a language successfu
Message-ID: <874@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 15 Dec 88 23:41:26 GMT
References: <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <2832@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
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Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <2832@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) writes:
>From article <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu>, by carroll@s.cs.uiuc.edu:
>"I always thought that the 'no ; before END' part of PASCAL was one of the worst
>"'features' of the language.

It might have been, but there wasn't any such feature.

>There is a style of coding Pascal that gets around this:
[hairy layout deleted]

There is a much simpler style of coding Pascal that gets around the problem,
if you regard it as a problem:  GO AHEAD AND WRITE SEMICOLONS BEFORE ENDS.
Ever heard of empty statements?
	begin s1; s2; end
has an empty statement between the last semicolon and the end.  That's LEGAL.
It was legal in Algol 60 too, for the same reason.  The effect is that a
semicolon before an 'end' in Algol 60 and Pascal is *optional*.  This has
been widely commented on, and any good Pascal textbook should point it out.