4 ms·

To be fair that's just vanilla English orthography.

old_sound 10y ago
Yup, and still people get confused at Erlang's use of semi-colons and periods. Do you think it is because other programming languages don't uses the semi-colon that way? Or that periods are usually used to access class members, but not to finish function declarations?
- klibertp 10y ago
  I think it's because most people have no idea how to use semicolons in natural languages too.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I think this is true. Anecdotally, I've looked up the usage of semicolons a few times now, and I think I know how to use them, but every time I'm about to I just rephrase what I'm saying so I don't have to. They are used so rarely in English it's hard to feel confident through exposure.
    - adrianratnapala 10y ago
      I use semicolons all the time; they are easy and useful. The two clauses separated by a semicolon are sentences; thus the semicolon is logically and grammatically equivalent to a full stop. (As long as you normalise the capitalisation). The difference is in nuance, flow, and other soft things. So when do you use a semicolon instead of a full stop? Whenever you want to! The really difficult punctuation mark in English is the full colon.
      - kbenson 10y ago
        Sure, which is what the rules always say, and is fairly straightforward. The hard part is actually using it because it usually looks so out of place to me. It's a chicken and egg problem, where semicolons are hard to comfortably use because they are so rare they look out of place when I try, and I assume part of the reason for their rarity is other people feel the same way.
      - petertodd 10y ago
        What's a full colon? Hard/NSFW to google for that...
        dragonwriter 10y ago
        Just a plain colon, as an emphatic distinction from a semicolon.
- tombert 10y ago
  I feel like the semicolon-period thing of Erlang is only really frustrating for the first day you're using it. After that, I actually found it to be a fairly natural syntax, and had little trouble switching between it and JS.

Yup, and still people get confused at Erlang's use of semi-colons and periods. Do you think it is because other programming languages don't uses the semi-colon that way? Or that periods are usually used to access class members, but not to finish function declarations?

klibertp 10y ago
I think it's because most people have no idea how to use semicolons in natural languages too.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I think this is true. Anecdotally, I've looked up the usage of semicolons a few times now, and I think I know how to use them, but every time I'm about to I just rephrase what I'm saying so I don't have to. They are used so rarely in English it's hard to feel confident through exposure.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    I use semicolons all the time; they are easy and useful. The two clauses separated by a semicolon are sentences; thus the semicolon is logically and grammatically equivalent to a full stop. (As long as you normalise the capitalisation). The difference is in nuance, flow, and other soft things. So when do you use a semicolon instead of a full stop? Whenever you want to! The really difficult punctuation mark in English is the full colon.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      Sure, which is what the rules always say, and is fairly straightforward. The hard part is actually using it because it usually looks so out of place to me. It's a chicken and egg problem, where semicolons are hard to comfortably use because they are so rare they look out of place when I try, and I assume part of the reason for their rarity is other people feel the same way.
    - petertodd 10y ago
      What's a full colon? Hard/NSFW to google for that...
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        Just a plain colon, as an emphatic distinction from a semicolon.
tombert 10y ago
I feel like the semicolon-period thing of Erlang is only really frustrating for the first day you're using it. After that, I actually found it to be a fairly natural syntax, and had little trouble switching between it and JS.