> Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 01:57:00 +0100
> From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?St=E9phane?= Payrard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> In the tradition of Perl concision, I would like newline to be a
> statement terminator everywhere it can: that is when
> a) the parser expects an operator
> _and_ b) we are not in the middle of a parenthesised expression.
Can you say "Ruby"?
No, I think a semicolon should still be required to seperate
statements.
> Accessorily, it would also help people to switch back and forth
> between language that use newline as statement terminator and perl6:
> they will not be burn anymore when forgetting a semicolon.
Of course, error detection as far as semicolons go is getting much
better. Parsers can determine (usually) exactly which line the
semicolon was left off of.
> Note that in Perl5, semicolon is not always required as statement
> terminator. At the end of a scope, being a closing brace, or the end
> of a program, including an explicit eval or an implicit one (perldb
> shell).
That's because, in Perl 5, semicolon is not a statement terminator.
It is a statement I<separator>. That is why you don't need it at the
end of various places, because you don't need to separate it from
anything.
> About the b) rule.
> ------------------
>
> The following code does not parse because of the newlines that are
> interpreted as statement terminator.
>
> for
> 1..10
> { ... }
>
> But
>
> for (
> 1.. 10
> ) {
> }
>
> is legit.
See, this is the main, unPerlish thing you're doing. You're enforcing
particular styles upon people, something Perl is proud of *not* doing.
Let's not forget the often occurence of:
$fh = open 'foobar'
or die "Can't open foobar: $!";
An implicit semicolon would cause it to croak there.
Also, s/or/$(any <<if unless for while when ...>>)/
It would be trivial with a grammar munge to implement this (heck, I
did it with a source filter in Perl 5). Surely CPAN6 (6PAN/CP6AN/??)
will come out with one of these right off the bat, so you could do:
use Grammar::ImplicitSemicolon;
Or something like that, and be done with it.
Luke
