Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

[Yigal Chripun]

On 22/10/2009 12:58, bearophile wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky:
>
>> I'm already kicking myself for trying to jump into the middle of yet another
>> semicolon debate, but..."burden" of semicolons? Isn't that a bit overstated?
>> I suppose it depends on the person, but I find it to be every bit as
>> automatic as reaching for the Shift key when I write camelcase, or hitting
>> enter for a new line, or going for control when I want to arrow around a
>> word-at-a-time. And those are hardly burdens (and sure, technically a
>> semicolon plus newline is more than *just* newline, but only negligibly so).
>
> Yes, you are right, adding the semicolon doesn't take a lot of time, but when you miss it, the program doesn't compile, and you have to find where you have missed it, sometimes this requires some time.
> And I've seen plenty of newbie programmers that think "the computer" is idiot and fussy for asking them to put such useless semicolons. I guess this is not a strong argument because newbie programmers will probably not want to start with D as first language :-)
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

Let's bring another language into the mix:
Pascal uses periods as the statement separator but it's only required 
between two statements.
something like

begin
statementA.
statementB.
statementC
end

notice how there's no period after statementC. This was considered at 
the time as confusing and people preferred c style semicolons because 
they are consistently everywhere so you don't need to think "do I need 
to put it here or not"

The trade-off here is obvious: if you use line continuations like in 
python they would be very rare but would not be automatic and consistent 
when you do need to use them.

I personally prefer to have semicolons.