why ; ?

[Bruce Adams]

On Thu, 08 May 2008 18:28:23 +0100, Michael Neumann <mneumann at ntecs.de>  
wrote:

> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>  > "Michael Neumann" <mneumann at ntecs.de> wrote in message
>  > news:48231B20.1080009 at ntecs.de...
>  >> Actually, IMHO any C-style syntax has much more sever problems  
> leading
>  >> to hard to find bugs:
>  >>
>  >>     if (a)
>  >>       s1;
>  >>     s2;
>  >>
>  >
>  > I can't say I've ever found that to be a problem. But maybe that's  
> just me.
>
> Me neither. But it's annoying to have at least 3 different style  
> guidelines for C-style syntaxes.
>
>    if (a) b;
>
>    if (a)
>      b;
>
>    if (a) {
>      b;
>    }
>
>    if (a)
>    {
>      b;
>    }
>
>    if (a)
>      {
>      b;
>      }
>
>    if (a)
>      {
>        b;
>      }
>
> And so on :).
>
> Compare that with how many choices you have when using "if ... end"!
>
> Regards,
>
>    Michael

I thought D had dropped single statement if's for this very reason. I must  
be mistaken. Many a (C) coding
style guide strongly encourages embracing even single statements in  
constructs like this.

You can go further with the idea. After all you can casuse ambiguity  
between e.g nested loops as well.

if (a) {
   while(b) {c}
}

versus

if (a)
    while(b)
       c
    wend
fi

or whatever.
You can mess around with this stuff forever without increasing programmer  
productivity signficantly.
The real gains are when you hit on improvements to semantic  
expressiveness. I'd much rather have the next
foreach than waste time worrying about } versus fi, endif etc.

Regards,

Bruce.