Re: language design tradeoffs

raveling@Unify.com (Paul Raveling) writes:


      Actually I like the idea of using EOL rather than ;. It eliminates a
      cause of several common errors in compilation that need not happen, and it
      need not have particularly adverse side effects.


      Here's one example of a human factors trap in C that wouldn't be there
      without ';'. The key is C's syntax definition for <statement> -- either
      one simple statement terminated by ';' or a sequence of simple statements
      surrounded by {}'s. [... macro example deleted ...]


This is a misfeature of C that comes about because of a conspiracy between
poorly chosen "if" syntax and poorly chosen macro semantics. It is not
very much related to how you terminate your statements (in fact, I could
imagine similar problems if you chose EOL as your statement terminator).


In my experience, explicitly terminating statements with something like
";", or even better, explicitly bracketing each statement (as in Lisp), is
the most effective syntax for protecting you from typos and slips.


Thomas.
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