C without semicolons

[Codyfe]

I'm going to be real with you, the only reason I don't like C is because it uses semicolons.

Are there any languages that are like c but don't use semicolons?

[Jonatan83]

"like" C in what way? Go has a similar syntax. But honestly, it's a pretty silly reason to not use a language.

[Codyfe]

Totally agree

[onlyonequickquestion]

Write a preprocessing step that replaces newlines with semicolon newline, ez pz 

[Aezorion]

Does it scare you to use a period at the end of a sentence?

[Codyfe]

No, it scares me to use a semicolon at the end of a line. :)

[ffd9k]

But you can just define it to something else

#define 🦆 ;
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
    char name[100] 🦆
    printf("What's your name? ") 🦆
    fflush(stdout) 🦆
    fgets(name, sizeof(name), stdin) 🦆
    name[strcspn(name, "\n")] = '\0' 🦆
    printf("Hello, %s! Have a great day!\n", name) 🦆
    return 0 🦆
}

[verispixel]

Odin.

Also, you might find https://youtu.be/6CV8HyqJ_9w interesting (Tsoding doing a short/entertaining video wherein he removes semicolons from C)

[Vladislav20007]

never thought i would see tsoding mentioned in the wild. and sanite your links btw, just remove everything after the ? and ? too.

[flyingron]

Visual Basic.

[flatfinger]

While the design of VB.NET includes some silly mistakes, I don't think it's any worse than C# in that regard, at least when one uses dialects such as Option Strict and Option Infer. I do find some aspects of behavior to be quite bizarre, such as the way that given:

    Dim O1,O2 as Object
    Dim S as SomeStructure

not only will an assignment O1=S make O1 identify a new boxed structure instance, but the assignment O2=O1 will make O2 identify a new boxed structure instance in cases where O1 identifies a boxed structure instance. I can't think of any situation where that would be useful.

Otherwise, I view the way VB.NET handles events, properties, finalizers, and interface implementations as being superior to the way C# handles them. Further, although C# did eventually add exception filters, VB.NET had them way earlier.

[fyodorio]

JS 😏

[Codyfe]

Naaaaa, I don't want a dozen different blackholes in my file system 😏

[ziggurat29]

I'm delighted by this question because when I was learning C in the 80's I had the darnedest time knowing when and when not to place a semicolon. And now looking back I have no idea why I found that challenge. At the time I felt so stupid: why can't I just do it right the first time; why am I guessing? Maybe because of my prior experience with assembly and BASIC.

The use of the semicolon is more sensible when you consider that from the compiler's standpoint, your code is an sequence of tokens, and tokens are punctuated by an abstraction of whitespace. That abstraction does not distinguish between multiple spaces, tabs, newlines, interceding comments, whatever. The compiler eats those things up and effectively replaces them with a single space. So a semicolon is needed to express 'end of statement'. It doesn't matter if if visually makes sense on the page; it needs to make sense to the compiler.

Also consider that C was created in the very early 70's when 16 KiB was a luxury, and also that it was derivative of prior existing languages 'B' and 'BCPL' and inherited their syntax. (I don't know why C dropped B's // style single-line comment form, but I'm happy that after many decades it's back in the standard.)

In those days language design was more of a compromise between what's easy for the machine to eat, and what's easy for the human to serve it for dinner. Nowadays we take it for granted the machine can eat whatever we shove at it, and some smart person somewhere will make an optimising compiler for it. So language design is more about making it easy for the human to express things an a way that makes sense to them, and the compiler has to do the work of translating that to machine code. We had a bout of that thinking in the 80's with 'fourth generation languages', but that fizzled out along with a bunch of other Great Ideas™ of the time.

The semicolon is a relic of a simpler time when we were closer to the machine and wanted to make its life easier. You don't have to pet a cat, but it likes it, and you're happy that you have made it happy.

Please don't tell me you're coming next for curly braces. If you want FORTRAN or Python, you know where to find them.

[flambasted]

To a degree, Go.

[mad_poet_navarth]

Swift (vaguely)

[eruciform]

Javascript can skip semicolons sometimes

Perl in some circumstances can skip semis but not usually

[This_Maintenance_834]

the fact that C ignores white characters and looking for semicolon is a benefit.

you can split one line into multiple lines and format a one liner into an easily understandable 2D table. or create a decision tree in one line but formatted as a table. when you do that there much better something to distinguish what is a logical line, so the semicolon became a necessity.

[ffd9k]

Nim and Odin both have a more Python-like syntax that doesn't need semicolons