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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

In fact in some programming languages you can (or should) omit things like this. E.g. pascal does not require or explicitly forbids semicolon before end keyword.

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See also automatic semicolon insertion in JavaScript, and conditional permission to omit closing <p> tags in HTML.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

Pascal is fully self-consistent here: in it, semicolon is a statement separator, not a statement terminator. Since the statement before "end" is the last one in the block, there's no statement to separate it from with a trailing semicolon, and so it's a syntax error.

It's not a syntax error.

Correct - the redundant semi-colon denotes an empty statement.

Pascal permits a null production for the statement grammar.

    simple-statement = 
              empty-statement 
            | assignment-statement
            | procedure-statement
            | goto-statement .

    empty-statement = .

from http://www.pascal-central.com/iso7185.html#6.8%20Statements (ISO 7185 Pascal)

In practice the separator-vs-terminator distinction mostly shows up in if-statements:

  if foo then
     bar
  else
     baz;

I believe that anywhere else in a statement context, you can put in as many extra ';' as you like and it won't make a difference. And of course you can drop the final ';' before 'end' or 'until'.

In those day when moving cursors with full screen editor (which is Not vi or Emacs), how many hours of my life wasted on this deletion of semicolons. Sigh.

Still I actually struggled each time this given not exactly sure I am in English or American camp.

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