4 ms·
For what it's worth, there's a precedence for it in formal, legal-style writing. UN resolutions, for example, are always written as a single sentence[1]. It ma
by chimeracoder 14y ago
For what it's worth, there's a precedence for it in formal, legal-style writing. UN resolutions, for example, are always written as a single sentence[1].
It makes sense when you think of an entire resolution (program) as a single goal (output/result), which involves many separate steps/clauses (statements) that need to be executed.
A period is a terminator; it says 'This thought ends here', while a semicolon is a delimiter (ie, the clauses it separates are independent grammatically, but not contextually).
[1]http://web.utk.edu/~modelun/resolutions.htm http://web.utk.edu/~modelun/resolutions.htm (Model UN rules, but you get the idea).
- mkopinsky 14y agoI have seen the same thing in mayoral declarations or the like. Whereas John Q. Doe is an upstanding citizen who has contributed to the city, and Whereas aforementioned Mr. Doe is an awesome dude, and Whereas some people who happened to contribute to my campaign are fans of Mr. Doe, Therefore, I, Mayor Wile E. Coyote do hereby declare Octember 31st, 2012 as John Q. Doe Day in the city of Acme, CO. In this context, the UN resolution is actually similar to the comma-style used here by Twitter. We don't want the statement/sentence to end, so we use semicolons/commas to make it continue, and end up breaking browsers/non-lawyer readers.
- jarek 14y ago> A period is a terminator; it says 'This thought ends here', while a semicolon is a delimiter Pascal takes this literally: semicolons separate statements, and a full stop ends the unit contained in a file ("end.").
- ars 14y ago> A period is a terminator A period is indistinguishable from a decimal point. So if you have a = 4. is that the end of the thought or the end of the integer? It's obvious in context to a human, but a bad idea for a computer.