The melancholy decline of the semicolon

Post by minimilian » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #107

mdp2021 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Now corrected. Informally: incredibly, one reads and re-reads, edits multiple times in a span of hours, and still leaves errors and imprecisions. Of course it was the period or "full-stop" - in reading, also as I had defined the colon differently in the next paragraph... By the way, you made me note that 'full-stop' is British English and 'period' is American English. As some of us prefer to write in Inter…

"UN English" generally follows British/Oxford usage, although there are a few exceptions: writing "Mr." with the full stop, "sulfur" rather than "sulphur", "1.30 pm" (not 1:30 pm or 13:30) etc. I think it's a decent compromise. All the Zs make it look weird to British readers, and all the Us make it look weird to Americans. https://www.un.org/dgacm/en/content/editorial-manual/punctua... ("full stop").

Post by bitwize » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

Post by seoaeu » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

bradrn wrote: post #49

Causality1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.

And the sad thing is, they don’t even know what the passive voice is! See G. K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive [ http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html ]. Their unintentional hypocrisy is quite something, e.g.: > … it makes little difference if you decide to look at prose written by the advisers on usage themselves. Consider the beginning of E. B. White's introduction to his revision…

Post by Hendrikto » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

zuj wrote: post #102

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a trade-off. You can either assume all statements end at the end of the line, and require a continuation character (backslash in Python) if that isn't the case; or you can require a statement terminator (semicolon/closing brace in Rust) for all statements. The downside of assuming statements end at the end of the line is that you need to have special rules for when that isn't the case (such as Python's implicit…

Thanks, this makes perfect sense. Python we are using \n instead of ; as the statement terminator. Just didn't got what you mean by "python's implicit statement continuation inside braces" ?

    x = (
      object
      .method1()
      .method2()
    )

Post by ReleaseCandidat » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

Tyr42 wrote: post #81

zuj wrote: post #77

Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does. (autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)

Well, have you ever run into the x = some_long_expression + another_long_expression problem? In Python you need to be careful to wrap that in () or use a \ before the newline to avoid it parsing as two lines, e.g. x = some_long_expression; + another_long_expression; In particular, if you have a builder expressions let x = someBuilder() .setVal(x) .build() You'd need to wrap the entire thing in () to avoid it getting…