On 11/12/10 9:44 AM, bearophile wrote:
Russel Winder:
I have to say I quite like not having to have semicolon
statement terminators.
I too don't like to add the semicolon at the end of lines, I like to write
Python code that doesn't need them, but in some languages (Scala, JavaScript)
this has caused more problems than it solves. So the language needs to be
designed to never require them at the end of lines and to have a not error
prone syntax.
Bye,
bearophile
Same here. The problem is I don't want to remember arcana about the
necessity of sometimes doing this and sometimes doing that. I first met
optional semicolon in the Cecil language, where the last expression in a
function would determine the result. So one would write:
method fun() { 42 }
to return an integer, and
method fun() { 42; }
to return void. This turned out to be a huge hassle, so I vaguely recall
the rule was changed such that ";" at the end of the function was always
ignored, thus making it difficult to write functions that return void.
Then I met it in Javascript, where the rule was confusing in similar
ways; a sensible piece of advice that I followed was to always use
semicolons. Finally, Go has yet other issues with the matter.
I guess only Python got that one right...
Andrei
