Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition

"Dr A. N. Walker" <anw@maths.nottingham.ac.uk> writes:
> 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.


I was always under the impression that garbage characters like ';' were
there to enable error recovery to provide meaningful error messages. Statement
delimiters are a place where the compiler can "sync up" with what it is
expecting. They are not needed in correct programs, but rather incorrect
ones.


-everettm
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