OK, so we all want to be somewhat popular, and it seems that my last article, “To Brace Or Not to Brace”, seems to have gotten a lot of attention, so, here goes my opinion on the popular semi-colon argument. First, I’m not against any languages in particular, but I have found that I do better in ones that have semi-colons. One of the features I really like is the ability to move my line returns anyplace I want, and to indent as I see fit. Though the semi-colon does not guarantee I can do this, it certainly makes life easier.
So, what’s wrong with using tabs to signal nesting levels and dispense with semi-colons? Well, for me, that is just too hard. I always seem to mess up and my code stops working. What about line continuations? I just have to ask why? Want to continue, just press the return key. Not much else to remember.
In College, I learned a language called PL/1 (long forgotten) that required semi-colons. I remember the compiler would constantly spit out errors saying “Maybe you have missed your semi-colon?”. I use to find that very annoying, but now, that I’m a semicolon lover, I just happily type them at the end of each statement I want terminated.
There are dissenters however. For example, the TheMightyFavog says “Let’s get rid of it. Nobody knows how to use the thing anyway”.
Just my 2 cents.
October 25th, 2009 at 4:44 am
In College, I learned a language called PL/1 (long forgotten) that required semi-colons. I remember the compiler would constantly spit out errors saying “Maybe you have missed your semi-colon?”
–> When learning Java for the first time in school, after knowing Visual Basic, those semicolons annoyed me so bad. Now I love them as well. It’s even hard to chat without ending every sentence with a semicolon;
October 25th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I love those semicolons. So much so, I add them every time I have to write a bit of VB. VB doesn’t like them so much though;
October 25th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
There are great examples (Python) of indentation usage instead of semicolons. Though, if your code is well-written it does not have many levels of indentation and this controversy is less important.
October 26th, 2009 at 6:51 am
I like the semi-colons too. All the languages, in which I’ve worked, are using ‘;’ for terminating a statement. the usage of ‘;’ gives me a logical break between more than one statement. if it’s not a ‘;’, i found it hard to understand the code.
October 26th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
[...] fun post by Peter Kellner sings the praises of the semi-colon and indentation-neutral languages in general. I tend to agree. Dittohead programmers (yes we exist) [...]
October 29th, 2009 at 4:50 am
I’ve never been able to understand why the semicolon is loved so much. Its an extra character to type that performs no function. You’re already going to use a carriage return at the end of the line. Why isn’t that sufficient? Sure, you sometimes want to continue the same statement on a separate line because its so long, or something. But that’s fairly rare, so why not use a continuation character for that instead of requiring an extra character on every single line?
December 13th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
David Lucke has a point, I am a VB.Net coder too and “;” is not required.