Re: space vs semicolon - why syntax error with the former ? (octave-3.4.2)

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 08/16/2011 01:52 PM, Sergei Steshenko wrote:
> this case - to me it looks like the 'for' loop
> statement is unambiguously
> over, and no special separator (e.g. ';') is necessary

> --- On Tue, 8/16/11, CdeMills<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > Sorry, but taking your reasoning literally is bogus: let's
> > consider
> >   if (0>1) disp('Problem'); end; disp(36)
> > if you take for granted that the 'end' close the
> > expression, then then
> > previous line should be equivalent to
> >   ; disp(36)
> > which is a syntactically incorrect.

> Normal languages do not care about semicolon before a function call.

There is no such thing as a 'normal language' in this respect. Look up 
the debate that raged in the nineties on whether semicolon should be a 
separator or a terminator. One doesn't have to look far, this is covered 
in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages_%28syntax%29

There are arguments for either style, and the debate ended in a tie---it 
appears that the score among the languages listed in the Wikipedia 
article is 24:21.

Matlab happens to be one of the few languages with both a primary 
(newline) and secondary (';,') separator---probably to make it easier 
for command line coding; they also overloaded the semicolon to control 
output silencing. It is what it is, let's get on with it :)