this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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[โ€“] force@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I don't work on any widely-used languages (I've made my own but not anything important) but I do think the designers of Zig and Rust have very good reasons for using semicolons โ€“ I read some reasons from the Rust devs themselves somewhere but I can't remember them other than it vaguely being about how Rust is expression-based and intended to be lightweight and how whitespace significance can create confusion around how to read and write certain things and bla bla bla...

but my personal opinion, what I generally I would imagine it's for other than readability, is because the code can look a lot cleaner when an expression returned from a block is just the expression, and not expression plus some token like return. It's especially nice in long closures or extremely short and simple blocks. I would rather consistently have to write expressions broadly like let a = { b + c }; rather than let a = { return b + c }. The semicolon has significance as a "result discarder" so expressions can be the default, so it's on the surface a lot more functional-friendly.

Also this is more specific but I hate the way WS languages generally handle quotes