[sc34wg3] Making semicolons and newlines equivalent?

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Xuân Baldauf
>
> When searching for a formal language which is very successful in a  
> non-European culture, we can easily find Ruby. As CTM is necessarily  
> a formal language, we may be able to copy some syntax-features from  
> Ruby. One of them is the equivalence of semicolons and newlines.

Actually, Python has this, too. You can put multiple statements on a  
single line by separating them with ";". I this actually started with  
BASIC, which used ":", if I remember correctly.

> Some formal languages have peculiarities due to semicolon-newline- 
> equivalence, an example fromhttp://docs.codehaus.org/display/GroovyJSR/Optional+semicolon 
>  :
> y = a + b
> Here, the parser sees that, due to the '+', the second operand ("b")  
> is missing. Thus, it does not treat the newline after "y = a +" as  
> end-of-statement.

I don't think this problem arises in CTM, given that the semicolons  
are superfluous to begin with. So putting a simple

   statement ::= (name | occurrence | ...) ";"?

into the grammar would probably suffice.


I don't think I like this proposal, but I don't think I hate it,  
either. It's worth chewing over.

--Lars M.