Re: Is the dangling else a syntax bug?

Lasse Hillerĝe Petersen <lhp+news@toft-hp.dk> wrote :
....
> On the other hand, most languages _do_ use the comma (and perhaps
> semicolon) as a separator. In any case, comparison with natural
> language is rather futile, as you rarely have nested periods.
>
> However, in natural languages, omitting a comma is rarely a cause for
> misunderstanding, whereas in programming languages it is almost always
> considered a syntactic error. Few languages make the semicolon
> optional (I don't consider line-oriented languages in that group); ...


If we consider any statement terminator not just semicolon, FWIW COBOL
uses period followed by a space to terminate a sequence of one or more
statements, which is almost isomorphic to terminating a statement but
being omittable on all but the last in a "sentence" or paragraph.
(COBOL85 adds END-IF etc. to specifically terminate nestable
statements, but still allows the old way.) But all statements begin
(at least) with a reserved keyword avoiding any ambiguity; in fact it
wouldn't surprise me if COBOL is LL(1), though I haven't checked. And
of course it tried unusually hard to "look like" natural language, at
least in PROCEDURE DIVISION.


--
- David.Thompson 1 now at worldnet.att.net

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