Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?
"Jérôme M. Berger"
jeberger at free.fr
Thu Oct 22 13:22:21 PDT 2009
Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 08:33:44PM +0200, "Jérôme M. Berger" wrote:
>> OTOH, nobody sane argues that we should add extra punctuation
>> between words when there is already a space. So *your* logic fails
>> comparison too...
>
> The difference is that a semicolon in D isn't analogous to a space at all.
> It is, however, directly analogous to a period in English; indeed, even to
> a semicolon.
>
> A period separates one statement from the next, just like D's semicolon.
> Spaces separate individual components of it - words in English, variable
> names in D.
>
The difference is that there is rarely more than one statement per
line in D, whereas it is common in English to have sentence endings
in the middle of a line.
Nobody said that you could do without any separation between
statements, but when there already is a clear separation then adding
an extra punctuation is just visual noise.
> The next level up is the paragraph, which is analogous to the braced block
> in code.
>
Jerome
--
mailto:jeberger at free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeberger at jabber.fr
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20091022/71c5b0eb/attachment.pgp>
More information about the Digitalmars-d
mailing list