On Dec 7, 2008, at 9:48 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
Yuh-Ruey Chen wrote:
Most people on this list consider automatic semicolon insertion
something of a mistake. However, I think this feature would be fine
if
it were not so "eager" and thus causing all sorts of subtle errors
and
hampering language evolution (e.g. the ongoing lambda discussion). By
eager, I mean that there are too many cases where automatic semicolon
insertion takes place.
There are, but I think it's a bad idea to change semicolon insertion
in such a way that currently valid programs are still valid but are
parsed differently.
Indeed, this is a non-starter. No browser-based implementation can
take the chance of breaking content by doing this. Opt-in versioning?
That just complicates things for implementors and users of the language.
I think it is a waste of time to fuss about ASI in the belief that
doing so will make novel syntax easier to add. It surely could, but
changing the meaning of extant programs (or such programs under a new
explicit version selection) is not going to happen. And we should be
skeptical of syntactic innovation that wants it to.
We should keep syntax from growing as randomly as it has in Ruby,
frankly. If ASI helps, great. I earlier plugged eclecticism but that
was to kick off the {|...| ...} lambda syntax bikeshed-thread. We've
reached some conclusions thanks to that thread. Borrowed syntax now
seems strictly less desirable than it did before that discussion.
/be
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