11 May
2005
11 May
'05
8:58 p.m.
No -- neither in Pascal nor in Algol do statements end
in semicolon.
Instead, statements are SEPARATED by semicolons. An important
difference, which PL/1 and C both got wrong, in different ways.
How did C get it wrong? I think Pascal got it wrong and C got it
right, because C did it much more the way humans tend to think of it
(and that, after all, is really what a programming language is all
about: communicating from a human to a computer.)
Of course, in C, semicolons don't terminate statements. They terminate
*some* statements - specifically, expression statements. (Well, that's
the big one. There are also null statements, the do-while,
break/continue/return, and (if you count them) declarations, and
semicolons occur embedded in a few places like the for statement. And
I may have forgotten something.)
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