Statement terminators

[Jim Vlcek]

In article <1273 at l.cc.purdue.edu> cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:

(Recommends requiring an escape character before newlines in multiline
statements, noting that this is already the case for macros)

Grrrrr.....  I've programmed in a lot of languages, and I've always
found that those which required escaping newlines in multiline
statements are the most royal pain in the ass to work with.

You see, we have to _read_ the source code we write, and having extra
characters in the source to escape newlines adds clutter which impedes
one's recognition of the source text.  Consider: in normal printed
text, a carriage return is simple whitespace.  Why should it be
different in source code?

I don't think that anyone would like to have to read their morning\
newspaper, or all of the articles in comp.lang.c, with everyone line\
break escaped, because someone wanted to eliminate the ``superfluous''\
period

And imagine this
Everytime one starts a new statement, one must insert a carriage\
return
No matter how short it is
No matter how annoying that gets
Get the point?

In fact, I myself would lean the other direction and prefer that
macros not follow the strict ``to the next newline'' rule, but rather
have a more explicit means of terminating the definition body.  I
don't like the notion that source which fits into a macro might not be
directly insertable into regular source code (due to the presence of
backslashes to escape newlines).

Jim Vlcek (vlcek at caf.mit.edu  uunet!mit-eddie!mit-caf!vlcek)