Semicolon?

[Aaron96]

On Saturday, 3 April 2021 at 11:07:47 UTC, John Colvin 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?
>
> SIL (in-house language @ Symmetry Investments, implemented in 
> D) has optional semi-colons. We made them work by insisting 
> that statements are unambiguous between eager and non-eager 
> parsing over line-breaks. Instead of choosing which version is 
> correct with a rule, we simply disallow anything that would be 
> ambiguous.
>
> For example:
>
> ```
> a = foo
> (bar())
> ```
>
> Instead of deciding which interpretation is correct (assign the 
> function `foo` to `a` then call `bar` *or* call `bar`, pass 
> result to `foo`, assign result of `foo` to `a`), this is simply 
> a parse error and the user must include a backslash or a 
> semicolon after `foo` to disambiguate.
>
> We are more conservative about this than we should be and 
> therefore disallow some code that isn’t actually ambiguous, but 
> in practice it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.
>
> Having said all that, D is fine with semicolons and should keep 
> them.
https://www.mybalancenow.review/