Semicolons in a grammar are nothing like nails or screws. Nails and screws hold things together. The vast majority of the time, semicolons in code are only visu

Semicolons in a grammar are nothing like nails or screws. Nails and screws hold things together. The vast majority of the time, semicolons in code are only visual indicators of the end of a statement; another perfectly good visual indicator is a newline. Many languages that require semicolons could (with minor modifications to the grammar) be cleanly parsed without any sort of statement terminator. See the Lua grammar for an example: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8 http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8