"C" wish list.

[Henry Spencer]

> ... I prefer ;'s as statement terminators.  Trying to look at it
> objectively, I can see very little reason to prefer one or the other...

I can; the limited experiments that have been done on this strongly suggest
that semicolons as terminators are rather less error-prone.  I conjecture
that the basic reason is the two-dimensional structure of programs:  a
semicolon on the end of each "line" is a consistent rule, but leaving it out
on the last line is counter-intuitive.  Contrast this with the situation
in, say, argument lists, where separators work well because all the structure
is on one line and the commas are really perceived as being *between* the
individual items.  Languages like Pascal and C are specified in terms of
one-dimensional token streams, but that is *not* the form in which human
beings deal with them.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry