The empty statement ";" - when is it useful?

[Don]

Stewart Gordon wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> D has ";" as the empty statement. In fact I think it's an empty 
>> declaration because it can appear at top level.
> <snip>
> 
> That's always been one of my peeves.  At least, ever since I discovered 
> that preventing such common C typos as
> 
>     if (...);
>     {
>         ...
>     }
> 
> isn't implemented by disallowing ";" as a statement altogether, even 
> though at the time there was nothing in the spec to _allow_ it.
> 
> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=327
> 
> Walter once claimed that it's useful for automatically generated code. 
> Though I'm still not quite sure how.

Yes. He's recently the claimed the same thing about the comma operator, 
but I don't buy that argument. I've never needed to use either of them 
myself. (In the case of comma, sure it works as a sequence point when 
you have: a,b, return a; but it doesn't work for a,b, return b; which is 
50% of the cases. I think it's a fallacious argument). Interestingly 
CommaExpression doesn't seem to be defined anywhere in the D spec.


> 
> Stewart.