3 ms·

Those contrived cases do not happen in practice. What does happen systematically though is the clutter and cognitive noise of semicolons.

mjevans 4y ago
Semicolons are like the periods of sentences It's so much easier to read something someone else wrote when thoughts are properly terminated Why would you ever demand that semicolons are removed They also prevent issues such as pronouns like SemanticStrength if used with mechanical automatic period insertion Seriously, semicolons are something that was baked into the design assumptions of JavaScript. Python's an example of a language where the syntax was clearly designed from the inception to avoid them. Most such languages make explicit tradeoffs and TBH I'd much rather have semicolons than whitespace sensitivity.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  No the analogy is wrong. I appreciate your example devoid of periods and while I agree periods in natural language significantly reduce the cognitive overhead, it is only because sentences in english can have multiple statements. Periods are not needed if each sentence span exactly one line, which is the case in programming languages. the separators &&, ||, () do the intra statement disambiguation while for interstatement {} suffice. ; bring no value in practice. Using multiples semi colons on a single line is pathological code that should never exist in the first place. When I code in Kotlin (which is not whitespace sensitive like python) I really realize that reading semicolon less code is smoother, it takes less cognitive resources (parsing is faster) and is more pleasant because the reading is not interrupted by vacuous symbols. There are no ambiguities in practice. The thing is, habits take time to die but ask anyone that has experience in an officially semi-colon less programming language, most will tell you it is a net improvement. BTW the vast majority of newer programming languages are semi-colon-less (Kotlin, Go, Swift, Julia, Scala, etc)
  - mjevans 4y ago
    Shell commands can be written as a list A series of individual invocations of arcane commands; sometimes with pipes Though it is not uncommon for one-liners to exist (sometimes with sub-shells). In that case the semicolons are not optional. Even in cases where another type of escape is used to visually break up the one liner into a list like series of commands which happen to be run concurrently; most frequently for really long pipe-sets.
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      Yes semi colons can be useful for shells and other DSLs
  - c22 4y ago
    Putting each "sentence" of code on its own line is actually the crutch that leads to low density and high line counts. As humans en masse become more comfortable parsing and writing machine inter-languages I imagine things will trend the other way.

mjevans 4y ago

Semicolons are like the periods of sentences It's so much easier to read something someone else wrote when thoughts are properly terminated Why would you ever demand that semicolons are removed They also prevent issues such as pronouns like SemanticStrength if used with mechanical automatic period insertion Seriously, semicolons are something that was baked into the design assumptions of JavaScript. Python's an example of a language where the syntax was clearly designed from the inception to avoid them. Most such languages make explicit tradeoffs and TBH I'd much rather have semicolons than whitespace sensitivity.

SemanticStrengh 4y ago
No the analogy is wrong. I appreciate your example devoid of periods and while I agree periods in natural language significantly reduce the cognitive overhead, it is only because sentences in english can have multiple statements. Periods are not needed if each sentence span exactly one line, which is the case in programming languages. the separators &&, ||, () do the intra statement disambiguation while for interstatement {} suffice. ; bring no value in practice. Using multiples semi colons on a single line is pathological code that should never exist in the first place. When I code in Kotlin (which is not whitespace sensitive like python) I really realize that reading semicolon less code is smoother, it takes less cognitive resources (parsing is faster) and is more pleasant because the reading is not interrupted by vacuous symbols. There are no ambiguities in practice. The thing is, habits take time to die but ask anyone that has experience in an officially semi-colon less programming language, most will tell you it is a net improvement. BTW the vast majority of newer programming languages are semi-colon-less (Kotlin, Go, Swift, Julia, Scala, etc)
- mjevans 4y ago
  Shell commands can be written as a list A series of individual invocations of arcane commands; sometimes with pipes Though it is not uncommon for one-liners to exist (sometimes with sub-shells). In that case the semicolons are not optional. Even in cases where another type of escape is used to visually break up the one liner into a list like series of commands which happen to be run concurrently; most frequently for really long pipe-sets.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    Yes semi colons can be useful for shells and other DSLs
- c22 4y ago
  Putting each "sentence" of code on its own line is actually the crutch that leads to low density and high line counts. As humans en masse become more comfortable parsing and writing machine inter-languages I imagine things will trend the other way.