why ; ?

[Walter Bright]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Python's semantically-meaningful indentation was intended to fix the problem 
> of poorly-indented code by enforcing proper indentation in the language and 
> compiler. But the problem is, it *doesn't* actually enforce it. In fact, it 
> *can't* enforce it because it doesn't have enough information to enforce it. 
> All it really does (and all it's able to do) is run around *assuming* your 
> code is properly indented while silently drawing semantic conclusions from 
> those (obviously not always correct) assumptions.
> 
> In fact it's really the same root problem as "no variable declarations". In 
> both cases, the compiler does nothing but assume that what you wrote is what 
> you meant, thus silently introducing hidden bugs 1. Whenever you didn't 
> *really* want the new variables "my_reponse" and "my_responce" in additon to 
> "my_response" (VB/VBScript coders use "option explicit" *for a reason*), and 
> 2. Whenever you didn't *really* want to break out of that loop/conditional. 

That goes back to the point that a language needs redundancy in order to 
detect errors. Having semantically-meaningful indentation, removing 
redundant semicolons, and implicitly declaring variables all remove 
redundancy at the (high) cost of inability to detect common bugs.

Those things are fine for scripting language programs that are fairly 
short (like under a screenful). It gets increasingly bad as the size of 
the program increases.