In all this discussion of trailing commas, there is a use-case that's not been 
discussed, which is whether or not a trailing comma after the last of a list of 
comma-separated items (typically on separate lines) makes it easier to write a 
program that outputs Swift code declaring that list.  It does.

If such a trailing comma is going to raise a syntax error, and one writes a 
loop for a set of listed items that will print those listed items, one either 
has to special case the first item to not be preceded by a ",\n", and print all 
subsequent items prefixed with a ",\n"; or one has to end all items except the 
last with a ",\n".  Either way is a pain, adds an extra test to the loop, and 
likely will be implemented erroneously the first time.

Code that is written by other code always has a strong incentive to avoid 
raising any compiler error/warnings, and so tends not to be read as much by 
humans who might think there's a missing item after the last extra comma.

How about a syntax warning/error for only those trailing commas that end a line 
that contains a previous comma serving the same syntactic function at the same 
syntactic level?


Doug McKenna

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