On 05/15/2016 01:01 AM, Joe Duarte wrote:
Good point that line-ending semicolons carry no information if they're
on every line (I assume you meant semicolons instead of commas).
[...]
By the way, anyone should be able to create a version of C, D, or Go
that doesn't use curly braces or semicolons, just by enforcing some
rules about indentation and maybe line length that are already adhered
to by virtue of common coding standards (e.g. blocks are typically
indented; and I realize Go doesn't require semicolons). If we looked at
typical code examples in almost any language like C, C#, D, Java, Swift,
and we systematically encoded their meaning, reducing them down to a
concise and non-redundant form, we'd find lots of redundancy and a lot
of textual dead code, so to speak. This would be true even without
semicolons and braces. There's still a lot for a compiler or any
interpretive agent to go on.
On semicolons:
There is a promoted style in D that does not use semicolons on every
line. This example is on the dlang.org home page:
----
// Sort lines
import std.stdio, std.array, std.algorithm;
void main()
{
stdin
.byLineCopy
.array
.sort!((a, b) => a > b) // descending order
.each!writeln;
}
----
A leading dot is valid, too. (It means module scope rather than local
scope.) So without semicolons, there would ambiguities:
----
foo()
.writeln()
----
`foo(); .writeln();` or `foo().writeln();`?
