Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!modcomp!joe
From: joe@modcomp.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What makes a language successfu
Message-ID: <5300001@modcomp>
Date: 16 Dec 88 03:14:00 GMT
References: <1126@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Lines: 28
Nf-ID: #R:etive.ed.ac.uk:1126:modcomp:5300001:000:1289
Nf-From: modcomp.UUCP!joe    Dec 15 22:14:00 1988


> I never could understand what the difficulty is with Algol-style semicolons.
> [extra text deleted]
> 
> 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

For me (and probably also for most of the readers of this newsgroup), the
problem isn't *concept*, its *mechanics* --- specifically, the mechanics of
maintaining other's code.  If every simple statement is of the form
"statement;" then I can focus exclusively on the higher levels of the
maintenance problem at hand.  At such times I don't want to be diverted by
trivia -- and selectively adding and removing semicolons to my statements as
I move them around definitely counts as trivia in my book, and hard-to-see
trivia at that.

For several years, I maintained and enhanced large Pascal codes acquired
from various places.  It was all of radically different style and because of
that, hard to maintain.  So I hacked up a prettyprinter.  It turned out that
its most valuable, stress-reducing asset was *not* the uniform style it
turned out (although that was useful).  It was the "semicolon after every
simple statement" rule that it enforced.

joe korty
uunet!modcomp!joe