Use of punctuation in a language?

Does anyone have any comments on the use of punctucation is a
language, eg, compare the following two approaches?


a = 3.4; b = 6.7;


or


a = 3.4 b = 6.7


which is better, ease of reading for humans, issues regarding design
of compilers (eg the punctuation-less version requires
look-ahead?). Perhaps lack of punctuation is a bad language design?


Any advice or comments would be gratefully received, I haven't seen
anything in the books one this, so was wondering what others thought?
We're designing a simple language for the exchange of models in
molecular biology, we have an XML based one, but know we'd like a
human readable one.


Herbert
[ Having used languages in which any string of characters is a valid
program, I can report that I vastly prefer languages with punctuation
because they make it harder to write a program that is syntactically
valid but doesn't mean what I wanted it to. It's a little easier for
compilers to parse languages with statement separators and explicit
brackets, but I don't find that anywhere near as compelling as the
human factors involved. -John]

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