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From: rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Indenting
Message-ID: 
Date: 2 Oct 89 22:21:27 GMT
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In-reply-to: R1TMARG%AKRONVM.BITNET@cornellc.cit.cornell.edu's message of 2 Oct 89 19:07:12 GMT

In article <21024@adm.BRL.MIL> R1TMARG%AKRONVM.BITNET@cornellc.cit.cornell.edu (Tim Margush) writes:
>What about the unnecessary semi-colons?  I believe these indicate a basic
>lack of understanding of the syntax requirements of the language.

  No, I don't think so.  Personally, I usually avoid redundant
semicolons, but there is a good reason to put them there: it means
that lines within a block may be independently modified.
  If I have some code without the extra semicolon:

		begin
		  i := 1;
		  j := 2
		end

  and want to add another statement, k := 3, I get:

		begin
		  i := 1;
		  j := 2
		  k := 3		(maybe with a semicolon)
		end

and I need to change the previous line.  This is counterintuitive; I
don't think that using the extra semicolons or not really makes much
of a difference one way or the other.  (Of course, when you're making
a change, you should always look at the surrounding lines anyway :-)
  It makes sense to use the semicolon as a statement terminator,
especially if you consider an "IF" not to be terminated when the
"ELSE" comes along.  The distinction between terminator and separator
isn't really critical, IMHO.
   
+----------------------------------+------------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student)        | rang@cs.wisc.edu |
| University of Wisconsin--Madison |                  |
+----------------------------------+------------------+