Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!arisia!quintus!sri-unix!garth!smryan
From: smryan@garth.UUCP (Xxxxxx Xxxx)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-style semicolons (was Re: What makes a language successful)
Message-ID: <2261@garth.UUCP>
Date: 21 Dec 88 01:36:28 GMT
References: <1126@etive.ed.ac.uk> <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <868@mcrware.UUCP> <4396@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: smryan@garth.UUCP (Xxxxxx Xxxx)
Organization: Xxxxxxxxxx (XXX) -- Xxxx Xxxx, XX
Lines: 26

>The question in my mind is *not* "Is a semicolon a statement separator
>or statment delimiter?" but *is* "Why do we need semicolons at all?".

Parse this:

     begin
       a
       +b
     end

Is that a+b or a;+b?

>I would contend that most, if not all, Algol-derived languages would work
>just fine without semicolons!

Most could also do without declarations, as does Fortran.

Redundancy is used to detect, maybe correct, errors in the presence of noise
(every use a backspace key). Natural language is chockful of redundancy, much
more than programming languages.
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