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Programmers care about it because it adds extra noise to your program. If you semantically, and naturally, communicate "end of statement" with a line break to
by secoif 15y ago
Programmers care about it because it adds extra noise to your program.
If you semantically, and naturally, communicate "end of statement" with a line break to human readers, why should you have to say it again with a semicolon to the compiler? Programming languages should focus on being DRY.
- surrealize 15y agoFor human readers we use periods, not line breaks.
- secoif 15y agoThe context is programming, not writing.
- sambeau 15y agoCode is more like poetry.
- sambeau 15y agoThat was not a flippant remark. Lines of code are clauses not sentences. This is also true of poetry. A sentence is more akin to a stanza in poetry, and a function in code. While I could entertain an argument for lines ending in commas and for functions to end with periods there is no reasonable argument for lines to end with periods (is there a language where a line is equal to a function?). APL, and to some degree Perl, are examples of languages where to you might consider a period half-way through a line.
- methodin 15y agoI very often use and see "single" line of code flow onto more than one line for readability. So often a line break is definitely not enough.
- secoif 15y agoI wasn't suggesting exclusive use of linebreak… Semicolon with no linebreak is fine, but semicolon + linebreak is 100% additional cruft. One or the other. Say it once.
- j-kidd 15y agoSemicolon makes it possible to do jQuery-style chaining with the least noise. I think frequent-backslash is uglier than always-semicolon.
- gf3 15y agoSemi-colons do not enable this feature. Multi-line chaining works just fine sans-semis.