• starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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    30 days ago

    ITT; people artificially constructing wildly unnatural sentences to try an force the semicolon to be useful and still using it wrong

  • Psythik@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I use them in at least one out every of ten comments; I feel like most people don’t know how to use them, however.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    1 month ago

    I hate the stupid semi colon. Why do I need to add it to the end of a line? Why is python smart enough not to need it but other languages still havent fixed it.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
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      1 month ago
      because some languages allow you to write statements  
          that wrap over multiple lines
              in order to space things out that would
                  otherwise be crammed onto one line,
          so for the compiler to know when the statement ends
              a character is needed so that it doesn't think the next line
                  is part of the previous;
      statement number 2 goes here
      

      Without that semicolon, you might have continued to read “previous statement” which makes sense at first, until the words that follow.

      Without the allowance for multiple lines in one statement, that second physical line makes no sense at all, despite the first one making perfect sense on its own.

      And without the spacing, the run-on sentence would be a lot harder to read.

      Sometimes you have to write code a particular way. Here I was making a point. In a programming language there are other reasons.

      • esc@piefed.social
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        1 month ago

        Python allows multiline statements with explicit \ and inside (), [], {} implicitly.

  • NotAnOtter@lemmus.org
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    1 month ago

    “If you can replace a semicolon or hyphen with a comma/period, you probably should”. Writing advice I received at age ~10 and it never stopped being relevant in literature contexts

    • ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca
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      27 days ago

      Far too many writers use a comma, when they should have used a semicolon or perion. It creates comma splices, where you join two main clauses with a comma.

      Wrong:

      His new car was flashy, it was bright red and had a custom license plate.

      Right:

      His new car was flashy. It was bright red and had a custom license plate.