Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators

Steve Brazzell <steve@brazzell.com> wrote:
>Can someone point me to a good source of information on the pros/cons of the
>requirement some languages have for statement terminators, such as the
>semicolon in C, Pascal, etc.?


Our esteemed moderator requested replies directly to the original
poster, but I'd like to point to a reference which I think many readers
may find of interest for its insights into programming language design:


      Brian W. Kernighan
      "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language"
      Originally Bell Labs Computing Science Technical Report number 100,
            published in 1981
      http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html (html)
      http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/100.ps.gz (gzipped postscript)


The author discusses semicolon as terminator-vs-separator in section 6.


--
-- Jonathan Thornburg <jthorn@thp.univie.ac.at>
      http://www.thp.univie.ac.at/~jthorn/home.html
      Universitaet Wien (Vienna, Austria) / Institut fuer Theoretische Physik

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