== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article > Lurker wrote:
> > When will D support that? Removing unnecessary semis really pretties up the > > code. > This idea reappears every few years, and even gets folded into a language now > and then. It started with Pascal, and most recently has appeared in Javascript. > The idea basically sux because of the maintenance issue. What maintenance issue? > The one where you decide to add a new line of code before the }. You inevitably > forget to go back and append the ; to the previous line. Even if you do happen > to remember, now your diff visualizer shows 2 lines changed rather than 1. While I've not coded in a language without semis, I don't think that adding the semi on a multi-statement line is something easy to forget to do. Did I grok your example correctly? > C got it right and it doesn't need fixing. > (There are other good reasons for the ; I outlined in my blog > http://www.drdobbs.com/blog/archives/2010/05/improving_compi.html ) I think that when people suggest removing semis, they mean that the compiler will put them in automagically, in place of an end-of-line character. So on your blog, where you suggest that semis are important as synching tokens, it's really the same thing, because you either work with the EOLs or the compiler converts them to semis on statement lines. Maybe it opens a can of worms, but maybe semis proliferate to new languages (obviously Go jettisoned the semis) just because someone picked the "wrong" way to do it with C(?) and maybe you didn't step back an eval that issue when you created D so long ago and/or just wanted backwards compatibility with C (?) instead of a "drastic" departure from it (?). So, we have a semi-new language (no pun intended), D that embraces semis, and we have a new language Go that rejects them. The thing is though, C- compatibility was not a goal of Go but some level of C-likeness was an important goal for D (right?). Therefore, I think I'd have to weight Go's decision more, at least for now unless they decide it was a bad decision and go back and change to semis. And I do like what the the unnecessary "missing" semis do for code readability. .02 (Just aloud off the top of my head).