[tomp]

I read your comment more as an endorsement of implicit returns. Make no mistake, I love those. I've been using them most of my life, first in OCaml and then in Scala.

I just think that using the semicolon to make the function return unit instead is problematic. It would be better to have the type system guide that decision, like in Scala. It would be even better to have an explicit `ignore` function or something (like in OCaml) to signal to the compiler that you really want to ignore the value and you only care about uthe side effect. I mean, why would you ever write just e.g. `a < b;`?

[simon_o]

> I just think that using the semicolon to make the function return unit instead is problematic.

Agree. The idea to attach additional semantics to ; is completely nuts, especially as ; is mandatory in Rust (usually, there are odd corner cases where it is not allowed).

Just get rid of mandatory ; completely and let the type system handle the rest.

[simias]

; is used to separate statements, how do you propose to get rid of that?

I guess you could use significant newlines like python but I never really liked that. I think Rust's compromise is pretty decent.

In particular it's the first time I hear people complaining about it, so far most users (myself included) seem to be praising it. Javascript's handling of semicolon is nuts, I wouldn't say Rust's is.

[simon_o]

It's 2017, I'm not placing ; by hand anymore.

We have computers they are perfectly able infer them for me.

> Javascript's handling of semicolon is nuts, I wouldn't say Rust's is.

- JavaScript does insane things, as usual. This doesn't mean every implementation of semicolon inference has to be that bad and broken.

- Rust goes the other way by pretending it's still 1990.

There are plenty of languages out there that handle semicolon inference perfectly fine.

(Heck, I even let the IDE show me where the compiler has placed them.)