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The melancholy decline of the semicolon

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Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#131

Post by bopbeepboop »

minimilian wrote: post #53
mdp2021 wrote: post #34

I am seeing a use of the instruments that seems quite confused. The semicolon is part of the division of the expression of thought in supersets and subsets of structural affinity: comma, semicolon, period, new paragraph. (Which also means that the semicolon has a necessary role in general: whenever the structure is best defined also using that level of affinity.) The dash, the colon and the brackets are instead relat…

Did you mean `full-stop' in your 2nd paragraph, or are you ascribing a double role to the colon and ignoring the full-stop? According to Fowler (The King's English), there was a time when the difference between , ; : . was merely quantitative (which explains the name `semicolon').

I’m not sure that time is passed.

I was in college only ten years ago, and my English professor’s key insight to punctuation is that it’s to define framing and tempo for your sentences.

That the sequence you listed is the pause count — similar to different empty spaces in music. Punctuation is just the negative space to frame your thoughts!

And perhaps a bit of tonality.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#132

Post by zuj »

Hendrikto wrote: post #117
zuj wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ?

I think he is referring to x = ( object .method1() .method2() )

Right, gotcha!

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#133

Post by jimmygrapes »

minimilian wrote: post #111
Symbiote wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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").

Writing `Mr.' is like writing `3rd.': the point in abbreviations is an ellipsis, but there is nothing after the `r' in `Mister'.

M'r?

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#134

Post by ineedasername »

I had to read a lot of Heidegger, who was interesting on a macro level but interminably boring on the micro level needed to see the macro. His readability was helped by the use of very visible double dashes-- sort of an extended version of the double-comma appositive structure in a sentence-- so the structure of his writing was easier to follow.

I liked that much more visual que enough that I adopted it myself for a while. Over time, I recognized that when I found myself reaching for the technique it meant that I probably needed to restructure things into more discrete chunks that build sequentially. When possible, conveying complex information benefits from as simple a structure as the information can manage.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#135

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

alpaca128 wrote: post #123
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)

Python and Rust have two fundamentally different philosophies. Python is all about quick and intuitive programming and it's pretty good at that, though in turn you can get more kinds of bugs and runtime errors that could have been avoided with proper type checking and other measures. Meanwhile Rust avoids any kind of behaviour that isn't clearly visible in the code. That includes unambiguous syntax, like the mandator…

That argument has the flaw of not working with Haskell, OCaml or F# ;)

Really, Rust only doesn't look like OCaml because less people would use it if it wouldn't have braces and semicolons.

Found this post, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5607912

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#136

Post by zozbot234 »

minimilian wrote: post #111
Symbiote wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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").

Writing `Mr.' is like writing `3rd.': the point in abbreviations is an ellipsis, but there is nothing after the `r' in `Mister'.

Well yes, it should really be Mʳ and 3ʳᵈ. The latter is still in common use, the former not so much.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#137

Post by behnamoh »

mac-chaffee wrote: post #128

I use them a lot to control the tone of what I write. Since periods can indicate a serious or angry tone[1], I often need some other way to indicate a separation between two complete sentences. For example: "It looks like you forgot to do X; that's needed to do Y." Using a period could be perceived as anger, but using a comma would make that sentence a comma splice. [1] https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q?t=3m3s

I wish there were more symbols for other use cases, too. I honestly think the standardization of things in the 20th century actually prevented lots of innovations in language and alphabet. Nowadays, you can't even imagine adding or removing a letter to/from the alphabet. Heck, we can't even change the layout of the current alphabet on keyboards because QWERTY is just too much standardized. In fact, forget about alphabet; we can't even change the symbols on keyboards (who says I must only use `~!@#$%^&* ... on my keyboard?) Sure you can use unicode characters, but why haven't the special characters on keyboards changed at all since the 80s? The answer: standardization.

The evolution of languages, words, alphabets, and special characters helped shape the way we think about things, and since the 20th century, that hasn't changed that much.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#138

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

the__alchemist wrote: post #104
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)

In Rust, omitting a semicolon has a special meaning, ie a return from an expression. So, you can't just ditch it. I wouldn't mind Python's whitespace indents in Rust though!

> In Rust, omitting a semicolon has a special meaning, ie a return from an expression. So, you can't just ditch it.

Of course you could, because a semicolon-less return doesn't work in the middle of a statement.

You can't do

    bla;
    a
    bla bla;
    b
instead of

    bla;
    return a;
    bla bla;
    b
Yes, the code after the `return` isn't reachable and the Rust compiler doesn't like that ;)

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#139

Post by pfdietz »

phoe-krk wrote: post #32
Sebb767 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly Lisp is the actual source of all evil ;)

A semicolon in Lisp starts a comment. Despite how bad some comments can be, I kinda doubt comments are the source of all evil in general.

I had been hoping this was about lisp comments. :)

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#140

Post by joegahona »

Veen wrote: post #90
gryfft wrote: post #26

This article does not demonstrate understanding of the semicolon; it is used incorrectly in the first sentence, for crying out loud.

It uses the semi-colon to join independent clauses instead of a conjunction, which is fine. It might otherwise have read, “The semicolon is a profound public mystery, and the only punctuation mark that…”. Nevertheless, it isn’t a great showcase for the semi-colon’s usefulness. The writer could have invented a more elegant example to begin the article; the one they chose is a prime example of a semi-colon that adds li…

A comma is not warranted in your alternate sentence.
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