One year of Go

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:29:15 -0500, Sean Kelly <sean at invisibleduck.org>  
wrote:

> I got about halfway through the Go tutorial and was stopped by this:
>
> "You might have noticed that our program has no semicolons. In Go code,  
> the only place you typically see semicolons is separating the clauses of  
> for loops and the like; they are not necessary after every statement. .  
> . This approach makes for clean-looking, semicolon-free code. The one  
> surprise is that it's important to put the opening brace of a construct  
> such as an if statement on the same line as the if; if you don't, there  
> are situations that may not compile or may give the wrong result. The  
> language forces the brace style to some extent."
>
> To me, what they're saying is that their syntax is broken and so it  
> forces a convention upon the users to deal with the issue.  I know this  
> is just a bike shed issue, but seeing something like this in the  
> beginning of the tutorial makes it difficult for me to take them  
> seriously.

As discussed previously:

http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=110968
http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=110884

What they say is this:

if(x)
{
    g(x)
}

is interpreted as this:

if(x);
{
    g(x);
}

Absolutely, 100% wrong decision.  Go will never recover from that IMO.

-Steve