Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

["Jérôme M. Berger"]

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
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