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From: kjm@ut-ngp.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Algol-style vs C-style semicolons
Message-ID: <679@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 8-Jun-84 17:44:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.679
Posted: Fri Jun  8 17:44:49 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Jun-84 00:15:38 EDT
References: <940@dciem.UUCP> <3000028@uokvax.UUCP>
Organization: Comp. Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin
Lines: 20

>  ... Look at C's excuse for a grammar, and you will see massive
> amounts of extranea in the production for "statement" whose sole
> purpose in life is to make it possible to avoid having to type a
> semicolon after the } in a compound statement. C therefore does
> *NOT* use semicolon as a statement terminator, no matter how many
> times you see people claim it does.
>
> I think that Huffman coding of tokens is not the best principle
> for language design.
>
>                                                 James Jones

OK, so C effectively has two kinds of statement terminator: ';' and '}'.
So what?  The two tokens terminate two different kinds of objects.

BTW, if C had been done with Huffman coding, wouldn't reserved words be
only one character long? :-)

        Ken "Smurf-shredder" Montgomery
        ...{ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!ut-ngp!kjm