Hacker News Reader

Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

    if(foo)
      doX()
      doY()

View on HN

Intuitively this becomes:

if(foo) doX() doY();

Intuitively, as a someone who uses C style languages, this becomes:

if(foo) doX(); doY();

Can someone confirm which intuition is correct?

I ask because, to me: it not being intuitive is a problem--even if it is not classified as ambiguous.

It being only contextually intuitive, also seems somewhat problematic--but maybe excusable if it is assumed you know some similar language going into it and it behaves similarly to that other language.

No idea what GP was trying to say, but the C style intuition is correct. The bug in that code is due to omitted brackets, it has nothing to do with semicolons/ASI.

My point was that its hard to tell where the semicolon will be inserted. As well as the intention of the programmer. Here is another example:

    if(x)
    return
    "foo"

    return callback
    (1,2,3,4)

I think I see what you're saying, but the context here was asking for cases where omitting semicolons causes non-obvious bugs. I mean:

    if(x)
    return
    "foo"

clearly there's a bug there, but adding in semicolons wouldn't change the code's behavior. So it doesn't affect the "is it bad to omit semicolons?" debate either way.

    if(y) return
      "bar"

The linter will tell you there should be a semicolon, and you are like, - no it shouldn't.

For the benefit of the rest of us, can you explain what issues this causes and where/how you are running this code?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com