why ; ?

[Bruce Adams]

On Mon, 05 May 2008 09:13:48 +0100, Tomasz Sowinski <tomeksowi at gmail.com>  
wrote:

>
> Just another feature thought. Never gonna happen, but still...
>
> What's the reason of having lines end with a semicolon? Anything else  
> than a legacy issue with C/C++?
>
> The only thing I can think of is having multiple statements in one line,  
> but that only makes code unreadable. Wouldn't getting rid of ; improve  
> readability?
>
>
> Tomek

There is always going to be a trade off between having to mark the end of  
a statement using ";"
or having to escape newlines. Otherwise a language becomes horrendously  
difficult to parse.
The rules for when you really need to end a statement would look even  
stranger if you only needed
to do it for particular statements in particular contexts. Perhaps you  
could have the best of both
worlds with a statementiser that knew more about typography and layout.  
Then your heading back along
the python path. Either way the keep is simple rule applies. If its easier  
for a compiler to grok
it might well be easier for a human to grok too and visa versa.