Semicolon?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 3/31/21 10:40 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 3/31/21 10:13 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/31/2021 2:59 PM, deadalnix wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:51:07 UTC, Arun wrote:
>>>> Just curious. Does the compiler need semicolon anymore? Are there 
>>>> corner cases that don't work without semicolon?
>>>
>>> They aren't strictly needed most of the time, but they do make things 
>>> much clearer, especially when you have a syntax error.
>>
>> Yup. They're a form of redundancy like a parity bit is.
> 
> There are a few cases that would be ambiguous. Not sure how realistic:
> 
> auto a = b;
> *c;
> 
> Without semicolons the semantics would be different.

Languages without semicolons generally use some other delimiter, usually 
newline.

The nice thing about semicolons is that you can pick whatever format you 
want, so whitespace can be done however you want. But it's a curse as well.

I've been recently teaching a class with D to homeschool kids with 
super-limited coding experience (in fact, everything they know they 
learned from me pretty much). We started with Javascript (optional 
semicolons), and lua ("begin/end" tags), and now on D, I find one of the 
most common errors that they have a hard time solving is a lack of 
semicolon. I don't know if this is specific to D, but I do notice that 
forgetting punctuation usually produces a wall of errors, of which only 
the first one is relevant (usually). When you have not been programmed 
to write punctuation in coding properly, the oddest things come out. I 
sometimes spend minutes trying to figure out why their code is not 
compiling, when I finally notice a stray closing curly brace somewhere 
off in the distance.

Not sure if there's a way to improve it.

-Steve