Re: Is the dangling else a syntax bug?

ralph@inputplus.demon.co.uk (Ralph Corderoy) wrote:


>In favour of terminators are their similarity to the normal termination
>of written English sentances. I don't leave the full stop off the last
>sentance in this paragraph.


On the other hand, most languages _do_ use the comma (and perhaps
semicolon) as a separator. In any case, comparison with natural
language is rather futile, as you rarely have nested periods.


However, in natural languages, omitting a comma is rarely a cause for
misunderstanding, whereas in programming languages it is almost always
considered a syntactic error. Few languages make the semicolon
optional (I don't consider line-oriented languages in that group); I
believe Turing is one of them. Is there any evidence that using such a
grammar is more error-prone, or is it just because it makes it harder
to write a parser?


-Lasse
[I think I've seen stats that users get statement separators wrong more
often than statement terminators, but I can't dig them up at the moment.
-John]

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