This makes sense. I personally prefer having something denote the end of an action ( carriage return can be misconstrued, but sometimes I like my code lining up sometimes).
And classes w/ thousands of lines are very confusing...refactor! :) On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 11:26 AM, David Arno <da...@davidarno.org> wrote: >> From: JP Bader [mailto:j...@zavteq.com] >> Sent: 23 February 2012 17:10 >> >> The only question/reference point I have is the lack of requirement for > this in several other >> languages I've recently been learning, i.e. Ruby, Python, Scala (IIRC). > They can compile >> just fine with or without ';'. Is it really that important to make this > required? > Scala has the same sloppy approach to semicolons as AS3 and so suffers from > similar problems when the compiler does and doesn't infer semicolons > wrongly, eg see > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2246212/why-does-scalas-semicolon-inferen > ce-fail-here. In this case "well Scala does it badly too" seems a poor > argument. > > Ruby (as far as I know) does things properly. A newline always denotes the > end of an expression. So BNF can precisely depict the language as ";" and > "\n" are equivalent. Semicolons aren't really optional in Ruby, it just > makes no sense to put them at the end of a line. > > I don't know Python, so cannot comment on that. > > When a language uses sloppy optional semicolons, one is forced down one of > two paths with a parser: hand craft a parser (the approach used for mxmlc I > believe) or hack a BNF-based one to handle the semicolons (the approach > taken by Falcon.) I'd prefer to avoid both of these methods and instead to > come up with a precise BNF definition of AS3 (or as near to AS3 as BNF can > get.) Doing so will make writing the parser far easier and gives us a parser > that can be expressed in a meta language. A whole range of different > language-based compilers (C, C#, Java, etc) can be generated from the one > source. > > David. > > > > JP > > On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 6:53 AM, saurabh jain <jainsaurab...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> +1 to mandatory semicolon. >> I always thought why this was not mandatory. >> >> Regards, >> Saurabh > > > > -- > JP Bader > Principal > Zavteq, Inc. > @lordB8r | j...@zavteq.com > 608.692.2468 > -- JP Bader Principal Zavteq, Inc. @lordB8r | j...@zavteq.com 608.692.2468
