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To: Davey Shafik <davey@php.net>, dmitr y <d726627@gmail.com>
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Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 20:19:09 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] ; on the end of the line
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

On Do, 2017-03-30 at 00:07 -0700, Davey Shafik wrote:
> Notice each of these has two statements. (Note: I don't think any of
> these
> are particularly good ways to write readable code, but they are all
> syntactically valid code).

The imo more relevant cases are the one where an optional semicolon
causes unclear behavior. Consider we make it optional, what is the
behavior of this code:

<?php
$a = [1, 2, 3]
[rand(0, 2)]
var_dump($a)
?>

$a could either be an array with three elements or a single integer
value which is randomly chosen out of the array. Requiring a statement
separator like semicolon makes this clear.

> While I know some languages make semicolons optional (javascript), or
> omit them entirely (python),  semicolons in PHP will not be going
> away (or optional) any time soon.

JavaScript shouldn't be our role model here - it has relatively complex
rules for this (essentially "if treating a following line as belonging
to the statement leaves valid code then treat it as part of the same
statement else terminate the statement on the new line")
Python does this by requiring indention on the continuing line. As PHP
isn't whitespace-programming this isn't applicable for s either, while
it's a way more consistent design than JavaScript in that regard.

johannes