3 ms·
> Rob Pike famously explained that C needed its space-insensitive braces and semicolons in case code was transmitted through a channel that mangled whitespace.
by 2143 4y ago
> Rob Pike famously explained that C needed its space-insensitive braces and semicolons in case code was transmitted through a channel that mangled whitespace.
Interesting.
And later when he (along with his collaborators) created Go, he moved with the times and avoided the need for semicolons.
Alongside they also shipped a tool that handles formatting so people can stop talking about that.
- darthrupert 4y agoNot only that, afaik they pioneered/popularized a style of coding where the formatter is always correct, not the coder. This made coding on every language much more enjoyable and more efficient. This is not something to write papers about, but a very significant thing anyway.
- MaxLeiter 4y agoAnecdotal of course, but a teacher of mine worked on the original Ada compiler and said each dev had their own formatting rules. The SVN had an unformatted version and everyone could format it locally. Not the exact same, but pretty similar.