Most other languages didn't want to handle the syntactic ambiguity of using the period as a decimal point and a statement separator.

For Prolog/Erlang, I think the preceding syntax is disambiguating enough

But if you're producing a list of statements, isn't a statement-list-joining punctuation mark the perfect thing to use?

There's also the difference in different languages between statement separators and statement terminators, but I don't really know enough about it.

It's incredibly simple. Comma means "and", semi-colon ends a clause, full stop closes out the entire thought.

Oh, now this is the last thing, gotta take off the ; or replace a , with a .

At least when I was starting out, I'd have loved a more C-like syntax with {} and consistently semicolons. Of course, Elixir came and just got rid of most punctuation, which I like less.

Anyway, it's consistent and after a couple weeks of messing it up, I can consistently see where the mistake is from the compiler error; after several years, I still sometimes mess it up, but oh well. I can't recall having messed up the punctuation so much that it still compiled but wasn't what I meant, so it's almost always quick to recover.