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Comment by maw | Hacker News Reader

When are semicolons to be avoided in JS? I assume daft styleguides pushed by people desperate to show how smart they are don't count.

I agree with your broader point, of course; certainly making them optional hasn't helped matters.

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I don't know of a single instance where it's advised to omit a semicolon, nor one where a semicolon is strictly required. They are always optional. About all I've seen is Standard's guideline to put a semicolon before your entry point closure:

    ;(function() {
        // .. snip
    })()

And even that isn't required, it's just a function of another guideline: "Never start a line with (, [, or `." But still, that is only relevant to Standard, not to Javascript in general. It's completely self-enforced by deciding to use Standard if you want. I can't remember ever needing to put one of those characters at the start of a line outside that particular instance, anyway.

I think the reason was to work around too simplistic minifiers and concatenators.

> daft styleguides

Daft is correct, but some of them are being pushed by large companies and (frustratingly) seem to be somewhat adopted.

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