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Comment by stack_framer | Hacker News Reader

I never actually type semicolons in my JavaScript / TypeScript. In work projects, my IDE adds them for me thanks to the linter. In personal projects, I just leave them out (I don't use a linter, so my IDE does not add them), and I've never had a problem. Not even once.

Semicolon FUD is for the birds.

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I occasionally run into problems with JS weird parsing rules. My favorite is:

    return
        x

Which does not return. It returns undefined.

Typescript helps a lot with that. A linter will probably flag it as well. Still, JS went way out of its way to accept just about anything, whether it makes sense or not.

That is what I lament too. So I've started to use the comma-operator to make sure my return statements don't care about line-breaks. I often write:

return 0,

I find this a mildly amusing discovery for myself because it took me a long time to figure out a useful use for the comma-operator.

Cormack McCarthy proved to me that when structured correctly conversive language does not need any quotation marks (while remaining entirely comprehensible).

But " " still exist (for us/mere mortals) because few can write so clearly.

I know nothing about coding (beyond changing others' variables to fit my installation), but would imagine this parallels many coding environments (e.g. yours).

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