On Fri, 12 Mar 2021 at 18:27, Guido van Rossum
On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 6:23 PM Peter Ludemann
wrote: [I wonder why C didn't adopt BCPL's convention for eliding semi-colons? ...]
[Presumably because it caused too many surprising behaviors...]
My guess is that it would have been more work in the parser, and therefore didn't fit with Unix "minimalism". ;) It's not clear to me what surprising behaviors there would be. Javascript seems to do OK with optional semicolons - presumably its algorithm is similar to what BCPL used. (Or perhaps the surprising behaviors are trivial compared to the other surprises that Javascript springs on people.)
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)* http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-c...