Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

[AJ]

"Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
news:hbop11$110n$1 at digitalmars.com...
> "AJ" <aj at nospam.net> wrote in message 
> news:hbo2up$2pb5$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>> "Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:mailman.222.1256163114.20261.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 05:05:04PM -0500, AJ wrote:
>>>> Why not eliminate the requirement for semicolon statement terminators
>>>> (unless there are multiple statements per line)? Less typing is "more"!
>>>
>>> It looks wrong, breaks habit, opens up bizarre parsing corner cases,
>>> and makes error messages uglier.
>>>
>>> Next thing you know someone will propose eliminating braces and just
>>> using whitespace to denote blocks. It's utter madness.
>>
>> Not "whitespace aware", but rather "newline aware". "Newlines" are 
>> already at the end of a line, so a semicolon is redundant. IOW, the 
>> default statement terminator can be the newline.
>>
>> struct something
>> {
>>    int x1
>>    long x2
>> }
>>
>> vs.
>>
>> struct something
>> {
>>    int x1;
>>    long x2;
>> };
>>
>> First one is definitely "cleaner". The less the eye has to bring in to be 
>> deciphered by the brain, the better.
>>
>> void somefunc()
>>
>> Is the above a declaration or start of a definition? Still though, only 1 
>> char of lookahead needed to determine.
>>
>> Maybe one can't fully appreciate semicolon terminators until one tries to 
>> implement a language without them. (Because apparently no one has written 
>> that article or paper (?)).
>
> I've spent a lot of time with languages that use EOL as a statement 
> terminator (along with the special line-continuation token that approach 
> necessitates),

Which?

> and I've found editing code in those languages to be a royal pain in the 
> ass.

Why?

>
> Also, referring to your second struct example above, D never has 
> semicolons directly after a closing curly-brace.
>

Isn't that ironic!