On Wednesday, 28 January 2015 at 22:28:08 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
For example, people often realize that the ; statement
terminator is redundant, so they propose removing it. In trying
it, however, it soon becomes clear that error message clarity,
recovery, and the correct identification of the location of the
error degrades substantially.
That explains why new languages make ";" optional, or wait...
Could it be that the language designers of new languages have
realized that using ";" for discrimination on line endings is
fragile and tedious. Could it be that new languages define
grammars that are more robust than the one used by C? Like Go?
Or to put it succinctly: If legibility is dependent on a little
fly shit on the screen, then the language design sure isn't
optimal.
