Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

[AJ]

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.224.1256169777.20261.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 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

That's silly. Source code is written mostly one statement per line rather 
than like text in a book. Shame on you.

>
> 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

Apparently it is NOT off-topic (someone else said: "hey, all you guys who 
don't want semicolons: find another language or create your own!"). While I 
wasn't proposing to change D, I wasn't NOT suggesting it, necessarily, for 
consideration in some version down the line (or what D could maybe morph 
into).

>
>
> ---------
>
> If the point isn't plain obvious from the above, fewer symbols most 
> certainly
> does NOT mean a language is necessarily easier to parse.

Your "point" isn't, though. Your "point" is like an incorrectly suggested 
metaphor.

> Symbols

The OP was not about "symbols". It was specifically about semicolons as 
statement terminators on single-statement lines.

> 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.


Well, if they were "the same thing", they wouldn't be something else, now 
would they?