Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tektronix!percival!parsely!agora!ihf1!bobd
From: bobd@ihf1.UUCP (Bob Dietrich)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What makes a language successful
Message-ID: <477@ihf1.UUCP>
Date: 19 Dec 88 20:27:39 GMT
References: <1126@etive.ed.ac.uk> <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: bobd@ihf1.UUCP (Bob Dietrich)
Organization: Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon
Lines: 28

In article <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu> carroll@s.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>I always thought that the 'no ; before END' part of PASCAL was one of the worst
>'features' of the language. I can't count how many times I had to recompile
>because I had added a statement before an END and forgotten to put a ; on
>the *previous* statement. 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.
>
>Alan M. Carroll          "How many danger signs did you ignore?
>carroll@s.cs.uiuc.edu     How many times had you heard it all before?" - AP&EW
>CS Grad / U of Ill @ Urbana    ...{ucbvax,pur-ee,convex}!s.cs.uiuc.edu!carroll

I should point out that using a semicolon in Pascal as a statement separator
is not as difficult to live with as it may seem. Most people make use of the
"empty statement" concept, consciously or not. That is, the statement
sequence "begin S; S; S; end" actually contains four statements, with an
empty statement occurring between the last semicolon and the "end". This
concept was easy to define and allows people to program in a style that answers
(in my opinion) Mr. Carroll's maintenance objections. The only real
difference between semicolon as a separator vs. a terminator in Pascal comes
in the if-statement (terminating the statement following "then" with a
semicolon actually terminates the if-statement). The other cases are covered
by the empty statement or optional semicolons (in record definitions).

usenet:	uunet!littlei!intelhf!ihf1!bobd		Bob Dietrich
  or	tektronix!ogccse!omepd!ihf1!bobd	Intel Corp., Hillsboro, Oregon
  or	tektronix!psu-cs!omepd!ihf1!bobd	(503) 696-2092