Comments on: Long Live the Semicolon and Why I Love it!

By: gerry lowry

gerry lowry — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:55:38 +0000

PL/I was one of my first languages.

That was about four decades ago.

It was also one of the best courses that I ever took because Coca-Cola was an early adapter and as one of the first PL/I programmers in Canada, I got to attend an internal IBM course.

Sadly, because the world did not yet have Microsoft to hate, IBM was the villain and and great language died because it was snubbed.

AFAIK, PL/I is still used internally at IBM but not much elsewhere.

I’ve never verified this but I’ve heard that Niklaus Wirth was a contributor to PL/I.

Regards ~~ Gerry (Lowry)

By: Carno

Carno — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:37:21 +0000

David Lucke has a point, I am a VB.Net coder too and “;” is not required.

By: David Lucke

David Lucke — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:50:22 +0000

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?

By: Helltime for October 26 « I Built His Cage

Helltime for October 26 « I Built His Cage — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:08:28 +0000

[...] 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) [...]

By: Veera

Veera — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:51:03 +0000

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.

By: Giorgio Sironi

Giorgio Sironi — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:23:18 +0000

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.

By: BlackWasp

BlackWasp — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:22:02 +0000

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;

By: Jef Claes

Jef Claes — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:44:50 +0000

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;