skaller wrote: > On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 00:50 -0400, Peter Tanski wrote: > >>> What's the opinion of 'getting rid' of semicolons? >>> >> As one who, as a beginning C++ programmer, discovered the bad error >> message g++ returns if you forget the trailing semicolon off of a >> class declaration, you definitely have my vote (on the general issue). >> > > So what is your vote, yes, no, defer, don't care, or all of the above? > I think the two key factors here are (a) how easy it is to explain the rules to users, and (b) how it affects compiler diagnostics.
Other issues are: (c) how easy it is to implement tools to deal with the grammar (d) how readable code is My intuition is that a little (emphasis: a little) redundancy pays for itself in terms of more uniformity and better diagnostics, such as by reducing the distance between valid programs. In the case of the change you propose, I understand that it would introduce ambiguity, i.e., reduce the distance between valid programs to zero in the absence of disambiguation rules (possibly built in to the grammar, so "disambiguation" might technically be the wrong term). Old Pascal-style (seperators required, extra terminators not permitted) is clearly unpleasant. Making separators optional would be clean if there were a known set of tokens which marked the end/beginning of statement. I'm afraid I've not been writing anywhere near enough Felix to have a feel for how close to true that is in the Felix grammar. -- James ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
