Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

Adam D. Ruppe destructionator at gmail.com
Wed Oct 21 17:10:47 PDT 2009


On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 06:53:27PM -0500, AJ wrote:
> Well it's more than "less typing". The biggest boon is time to comprehend 
> (the mind can parse less symbols faster).

o rly i find dat xtremly ulikly it seems 2 me dat symbols r actually very
useful in figuring out what ends where but hey the mind can parse less
symbols faster b/c aj says so so he shouldnt have any problem reading this
message at all am i rite

And does EVERY itsybitsy thread have to be about D or D 2009 vs DDD 
2020 Cant general language design issues be discussed here and be 
usefulinteresting I wasnt proposing changing D but rather trying to find 
the rationale for semicolons ie Would I have chosen that if I was 
creating a language

No not at all lots of threads go off topic and they are a lot of fun but
it is the default assumption that messages here are about d if you want
to just talk general design u should prolly just let us know in the subject
or the body of the message somewhere


---------

If the point isn't plain obvious from the above, fewer symbols most certainly
does NOT mean a language is necessarily easier to parse. Symbols give us
a parsing anchor - periods in a sentence aren't strictly necessary - we could
put one per line, or just figure out where they belong by parsing the context.
But that's fairly obviously much harder than using periods to follow where
you are.

Semicolons are the same thing.

-- 
Adam D. Ruppe
http://arsdnet.net



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