Article View: comp.lang.misc
Article #6037Re: Algol-style semicolons (was Re: What makes a language successful)
From: Xxxxxx Xxxx
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 1988 01:36
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 1988 01:36
27 lines
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1565 bytes
>The question in my mind is *not* "Is a semicolon a statement separator
>or statment delimiter?" but *is* "Why do we need semicolons at all?".
Parse this:
begin
a
+b
end
Is that a+b or a;+b?
>I would contend that most, if not all, Algol-derived languages would work
>just fine without semicolons!
Most could also do without declarations, as does Fortran.
Redundancy is used to detect, maybe correct, errors in the presence of noise
(every use a backspace key). Natural language is chockful of redundancy, much
more than programming languages.
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!arisia!quintus!sri-unix!garth!smryan From: smryan@garth.UUCP (Xxxxxx Xxxx) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Algol-style semicolons (was Re: What makes a language successful) Message-ID: <2261@garth.UUCP> Date: 21 Dec 88 01:36:28 GMT References: <1126@etive.ed.ac.uk> <208100002@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <868@mcrware.UUCP> <4396@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM> Reply-To: smryan@garth.UUCP (Xxxxxx Xxxx) Organization: Xxxxxxxxxx (XXX) -- Xxxx Xxxx, XX Lines: 26