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From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: MPW wish list
Keywords: MPW
Message-ID: <1990Feb9.140625.6074@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 9 Feb 90 14:06:25 GMT
References: <1990Jan23.065751.29303@peace.waikato.ac.nz> <6310@internal.Apple.COM> <55359@hobbit.UUCP> <1990Jan25.191441.26280@oracle.com> <416@dbase.A-T.COM> <19240@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <10865@claris.com>
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Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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In article <10865@claris.com> drc@claris.com (Dennis Cohen) writes:
>The University of
>Wisconsin's Univac 1100 compiler gave a warning message with the context and
>continued to compile, treating the source as though the semicolon were there.

The other way to look at that is, if a compiler knows there ought to be a
semicolon at some point in your program, then the semicolon could be safely
removed from the language definition, as not adding anything meaningful
to the language.  :-)

Seriously, this really isn't an option in C, where just about anything is
possible just about anywhere; there's very little a compiler could infer.
Thus there are so few cases where the thing might be useful that it's not
worth doing.

(My very favorite C compiler inference was the way some UNIX compilers
disambiguated declarations like:
	int i=-1;
Since "=-" used to be how one wrote "-=", the compiler had a choice.  What
it did was:
	int i =- 1;	# warning, old fashioned assignment operator
			# syntax error in initializer (illegal operator)
I found this an amusingly wrongheaded thing to do in the name of backwards
compatibility.)
--
Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: {convex,uunet}!uiucuxc!dorner