Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:hbp5qa$1teh$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Walter Bright:
>
>> Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>>
>> Ifthepointisntplainobviousfromtheabovefewersymbolsmostcertainly
>> doesNOTmeanalanguageisnecessarilyeasiertoparseSymbolsgiveus
>> aparsinganchorperiodsinasentencearentstrictlynecessarywecould
>> putoneperlineorjustfigureoutwheretheybelongbyparsingthecontext
>> Butthatsfairlyobviouslymuchharderthanusingperiodstofollowwhere
>> youareSemicolonsarethesamething
>>
>> (Fixed that for you!)
>
> Having no spaces is not comparable to having no semicolons, because 
> newlines are kept.
> Better to have a little more complex parser than putting the burden of 
> adding the correct semicolons on the programmers.
>

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). 
Line-continuation operators, on the other hand, or complex rules for when a 
semicolon is or isn't required (along with the resulting inconsistency of 
some things having semicolons and other things not), do tend to noticeably 
get in my way.