Re^2: What esteemed monks think about changes necessary/desirable in Perl 7 outside of OO staff

[likbez]

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[dave_the_m]

So instead, beginners would encounter the interesting psychological phenomenon where a physical end of line is sometimes interpreted by the compiler as an end of statement, and other times not. One set of errors would be replaced by another.

Dave.

[haj]

That's neither a natural tendency nor an interesting psychological phenomenon. You just made that up.

Semicolons at the end of a statement are as natural as a full stop "." at the end of a sentence, regardless of whether the sentence is the last in a paragraph. The verification process whether a line "looks syntactically correct" takes longer than just hitting the ";" key, and the chances of a wrong assessment of "correct" may lead to wrong behavior of the software.

Language-aware editors inform you about a missing semicolon by indenting the following line as a continuation of the statement in the previous line, so it is hard to miss.

If, on the other hand, you want to omit semicolons, then the discussion should have informed you that you aren't going to find followers.

[dsheroh]

Because people have a natural tendency to omit them at the end of the line.

Fascinating. I've never heard of, nor observed, such a tendency. Might you provide references to a few peer-reviewed studies on the topic? I don't necessarily need URLs or DOIs (although those would be most convenient) - bibliographic citations, or even just the titles, should be sufficient, since I have access to a good academic publication search system.

Offhand, the only potentially-related publication I can locate is "The Case of the Disappearing Semicolon: Expressive-Assertivism and the Embedding Problem" (Philosophia. Dec2018, Vol. 46 Issue 4), but that's a paper on meta-ethics, not programming.