Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

language_fan foo at bar.com.invalid
Wed Oct 21 15:48:13 PDT 2009


Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:29:37 -0400, bearophile thusly wrote:

>>Why not eliminate the requirement for semicolon statement terminators
>>(unless there are multiple statements per line)?<
> 
> Probably mostly because both some part of D language, some part of the
> mind of D developers, and some of the D programmers are "old school" and
> like to do things as they were in the past. I can list you twenty
> examples of this. Breaking old habits is not easy.
> 
> -----------------
> 
> Adam D. Ruppe:
> 
>> It looks wrong,
> 
> To me semicolons everywhere look wrong, even if I've programmed enough
> with languages that require a semicolon at the ends.
> 
> 
>> breaks habit,
> 
> It breaks a negative habit.
> 
> 
>> opens up bizarre parsing corner cases, and makes error messages uglier.
> 
> I have yet to see a proof of this.
> 
> 
>> Next thing you know someone will propose eliminating braces and just
>> using whitespace to denote blocks. It's utter madness.
> 
> Even "worse", someone may even implement such alternative D syntax, and
> the sky will fall on your head: http://delight.sourceforge.net/

Relax, bearophile. It seems there are some things you cannot change in 
this world. It will not suffice that you prove them wrong. I think I'll 
just give up on D. The development model is too stagnant. The author 
refuses to learn from "new" languages like Python or C#, or old languages 
(SML) unless someone is kind enough to spend whole day explaining the 
features to him. That's a sick basis for developing new languages. Large 
part of the community shares this mindset. The more I think about it, the 
more I realize this language is not for me. I apologize my arrogance. Bye.



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