Semicolons: mostly unnecessary?

[Walter Bright]

Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
>     And what about the spaces version? After all, nobody suggested 
> removing *all* separation between statements like you did, just 
> *redundant* separation.

The spaces and punctuation were quite redundant in the message. I doubt 
it would be difficult to write a program that would take that and insert 
all the spaces and punctuation.

I'm not much of a written language historian, but paragraphs, spaces, 
punctuation, and case were all invented to improve readability. Very old 
written languages have none of them, they're just a wall of letters.

Punctuation and whitespace are in programming languages to improve 
readability and reduce errors (some of these choices make the languages 
harder to parse, but are worthwhile because they make it easier for 
humans to parse).