Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.)

"Dr A. N. Walker" <anw@maths.nottingham.ac.uk>
Tue, 2 May 1995 13:37:24 GMT

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[6 earlier articles]
Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) cg@Myrias.AB.CA (1995-04-27)
Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de (1995-04-28)
Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) jgmorris@cs.cmu.edu (Greg Morrisett) (1995-04-29)
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Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) daveb@perth.DIALix.oz.au (1995-04-30)
Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) anw@maths.nottingham.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker) (1995-05-02)
Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) lwall@netlabs.com (1995-05-09)
Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) tchannon@black.demon.co.uk (Tim Channon) (1995-05-04)
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Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (1995-05-10)
Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.) monnier@di.epfl.ch (Stefan Monnier) (1995-05-11)
[10 later articles]
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: "Dr A. N. Walker" <anw@maths.nottingham.ac.uk>
Keywords: syntax, design
Organization: Maths Dept., Nottingham University, UK.
References: 95-04-013 95-04-160
Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 13:37:24 GMT

ludemann@netcom.com (Peter Ludemann) writes about semicolon-free syntaxes:
>Indeed: I can think of 3 examples.


Here is a fourth: throw away the semicolons in Pascal, and the
only ambiguity is that you can't always see where the empty statements are.
This can easily be cured by adding a visible representation [such as ";"]
of such statements.


Whether this is a Good Thing from the point of view of the poor
programmer trying to make sense of the error messages coming from the
compiler is quite another matter.


--
Andy Walker, Maths Dept., Nott'm Univ., UK.
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk
--


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