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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

No, as python and other languages amply demonstrate, the semicolon is for the compiler, not the developer. If the compiler is sophisticated enough to figure out that a semicolon is needed, it has become optional. That's the OP's point.

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But the language spec for Python is what allows for this, not the compiler. \n is just the magic character now except now we also need a \ to make multiline expressions. It’s all trade offs, compilers are not magic

> now except now we also need a \ to make multiline expressions.

You never need the backslash in Python to make multiple expressions. There's always a way to do multiline using parentheses. Their own style guidelines discourage using backslash for this purpose.

And you can also do it with triple quotation marks if strings are involved, but it’s still more work for the compiler that someone explicitly did, it’s not magic.

Plain strings work fine. Python has the same behavior as C: If two strings separated by whitespace, it concatenates them. So if I have a long string, I start with an open parenthesis, type one string, go to the next line, and another, and so on over several lines. Python sees it all as one string. Very readable.

Scala then. Semicolons are optional but you still can have them if you need them

The obvious example would have been JavaScript, but nobody wants to say something positive about JavaScript...

JavaScript has some specific and unique issues. Some silly choices (like auto inserting of semi-colons after empty return) and source code routinely, intentionally getting mangled by minification.

> but nobody wants to say something positive about JavaScript...

For obvious reasons...

It's not that the semicolon is somehow a special character and that's why it's required/optional. It's the context that makes it necessary or not. Python proves that it's possible to design a language that doesn't need semicolons; it does not mean that e.g. Java or C are well defined if you make semicolons optional.

If it’s in the language spec as required there and I’m using a compiler that claims to implement that language spec, I want the compiler to raise the error.

Additionally offering help on how to fix it is welcome, but silently accepting not-language-X code as if it were valid language-X code is not what I want in a language-X compiler.

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