"C" wish list/semicolons
Andrew Koenig
ark at alice.UucP
Thu Nov 7 02:28:41 AEST 1985
> Taking that into account, the best thing for semicolons is:
> Let them separate two staments on the same line. Let line breaks
> terminate statements if it makes sense to do so.
> For example, a block could look like:
> {
> x = 23; y = 40
> z = x + y
> printf("Messy Format", x, y, z,
> f) /* Statement didn't end, as it wouldn't parse */
> f = x + 7 /* Does this end? */
> * y /* Uh, no... */
> }
Ummm... the assignment to f is problematic. Let's change it a bit:
f = x + 7
*p++
Now, is this one statement or two? I strongly suggest that if
you want to have a syntactic rule for continuing a statement,
you make it a lexical rule instead, as in EFL. Thus, if the
last token on a line is {insert list here}, the statement is
continued. The list would be exactly those tokens that cannot
ever end a statement, such as ( = + - * / and so on.
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