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Re:Felix - a fast scripting language by Kiro on Friday January 04, 2013 @02:15PM (#5009203)
You obviously have no idea what signal-to-noise ratio is about if you think semicolons are noise. Who are you trying to impress?
Re:Felix - a fast scripting language by pekk on Friday January 04, 2013 @02:59PM (#5009497)
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.