You obviously have no idea what signal-to-noise ratio is about if you think semicolons are noise. Who are you trying to impress?
End of line is already encoded in source files as \n. Redundancy isn't noise, but it is redundant.
Re:Felix - a fast scripting language
by seanmcdirmid on Friday January 04, 2013 @06:45PM
(#5010686)
If end of line always means end of statement, by all means get rid of semi colons. If some non-trivial algorithms is used to infer end-of-statement boundaries that is more complicated than detecting end-of-line, then...there will be subtle problems.
I went through this transition before in Scala, the error messages got a lot worse after semi-colon inference was added. I wound up telling people to add semi-colons to their code when they were scratching their head at some sort of parse/type error message.
Re:Felix - a fast scripting language
by andrewflnr on Friday January 04, 2013 @03:06PM
(#5009536)
Semicolons are distracting, both reading and writing, and mostly useless. If it's not "noise" in a technical sense, is it not still a bad thing? I don't think this should be a complicated question.
Re:Felix - a fast scripting language
by stcredzero on Friday January 04, 2013 @03:08PM
(#5009550)
It all depends on what you define as signal and what you define as noise.
If you REALLY need end of line markers, any half-way competent text editor can display them for you.