this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Growing up with C made me assume semicolons and braces were needed to avoid subtle bugs, but experience with more recent languages showed me that it's possible to reliably parse the same semantic cues that humans use: indentation, parentheses, and other such context. (Perhaps this was less viable when C was invented, due to more constrained hardware.)
I was skeptical at first, but in practice, I have never encountered a bug caused by this approach in Python, Nim, or any other language implementing it consistently, over the course of a decade or two using them. Meanwhile, I have seen more than a few bugs caused by brace and semicolon mistakes.
So nowadays (outside of niche & domain-specific languages) I see braces and semicolons as little more than annoying noise and fuel for religious arguments.
Fortran is ancient and does fine without ;
When Fortran was created, each line was a separate punched card. The syntax made sense for that medium.
C was setup from the start for use on teletypes with fancy line editors like ed.