Good work digging through these historic esoteric languages. Wikipedia states McCarthy of Lisp fame invented it so many of the evangelists here likely know the conclusion here.
Not the best of examples. It hasn’t always been. Early fortran and lisp didn’t have it. Reading https://medium.com/better-programming/a-brief-history-of-the..., it seems Algol and PL/I set the trend to make it popular.
Looking at newer languages, I also get the impression it’s on the way out. Rust has them, but python, scala, go and swift try to avoid them (https://python-reference.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docs/opera...: “Avoid having multiple statements on a single line. Though the language definition allows one to use a semi-colon to delineate statements, doing so without reason makes one’s code harder to read”, https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#semicolons: “Like C, Go's formal grammar uses semicolons to terminate statements, but unlike in C, those semicolons do not appear in the source. Instead the lexer uses a simple rule to insert semicolons automatically as it scans, so the input text is mostly free of them.”, https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/LanguageGuide/TheBasics.ht...: “Unlike many other languages, Swift doesn’t require you to write a semicolon (;) after each statement in your code, although you can do so if you wish. However, semicolons are required if you want to write multiple separate statements on a single line”)