why ; ?

[Tom]

Pragma escribió:
> Tomasz Sowinski 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?
>>
> 
> ECMAScript (JavaScript) allows this by making the terminating ';' optional,  but you wind up with occasionally hard-to-find ambiguities as a result.  You wind up falling back on using ';' everywhere as a habit just to avoid that problem.  Requiring it, on the other hand, means that this problem never comes up.
> 
> As as part of D's philosophy is to reduce to program errors by language design, removing ';' would be somewhat against that goal.  Even making it optional would be a bad move IMO.  So I think it's here to stay.

I fully agree.


--
Tom;