[goatlover]

Or as an unnecessary end of statement character to clutter up your code with.

[outworlder]

> Or as an unnecessary end of statement character to clutter up your code with.

To the benefit of compiler writers, in detriment of everyone else.

[reificator]

I've come in to fix bugs caused by ASI many a time. Having an explicit character to denote the end of a statement is much more valuable than people pretend.

And don't get me started on meaningful whitespace vs brackets.

[outworlder]

> Having an explicit character to denote the end of a statement is much more valuable than people pretend.

No, I'm not talking about automatic semicolon insertion. I'm talking about _ not having semicolons at all _.

Many languages are like that – in fact, almost all languages which are not descendants of the C branch.

[reificator]

I think you quoted the wrong part of the message there, but I understand.

Still, without a line terminator you either have to use newlines, which sometimes will help make cleaner code and sometimes will make a mess of temporary variables and such. Or you have ambiguity, which is why I bring up the the anecdotes about fixing ASI errors.

[goatlover]

Which makes it interesting that the Go creators, being heavily into C before, decided to ditch the end of statement semicolon.