Austin Hastings:
> A similar trade-off exists with the statement terminating semicolon. In
> this case, it involves the number of statements per line:
>
> A language that terminates statements can ignore whitespace, allowing
> multiple statements per line and statements that span multiple lines.
Still possible with optional semicolons (as you say later):
a = 1
b = \
2
c = 3; d = 4
> The vast majority of languages have opted to terminate statements.
Most of the younger scripting languages didn't.
> Probably the best argument is that encountering a
> semicolon (or full stop, in COBOL) is a positive indicator rather than a
> negative one. "I see a semicolon. I know the statement is over." as
> opposed to "I don't see a continuation marker, so it's likely that the
> statement is over, although it could be tabbed way off to the right or
> something."
Your semicolon could also be tabbed way off, so you can't be sure there
either.
"I see no semicolon, so it's likely that the statement continues on the
next line".
> So line termination doesn't gain a punctuation character
No problem I think.
> and causes the ends of lines to be uncertain.
It's exactly as certain as with semicolon termination. See above.
> It does reduce typing, for the small crowd of people that wouldn't
> just use them anyway because they use them in every other language.
> I think the lack of value here outweights the "savings" of one character
> per line.
But even if the advantage of line termination is low (some characters
saved, some people might say it looks cleaner), I cannot see any
advantage of semicolon termination.
--
Thomas Wittek
http://gedankenkonstrukt.de/
Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
