C, Pascal, and ALGOL (1958) use semicolons as a statement delimiter. Why was the semicolon chosen instead of, say, the period or newline? BCPL (like JS and Go) allows semicolons to be omitted if a statement ends unambiguously on one line.
Was the semicolon a QWERTY home row key before or after ALGOL?
Start with ASCII. Now take out the characters which did not reliably appear in character formats, take out characters that have meaning to us in mathematical expressions, have obvious utilities as delimiters in other context, or which convey mood. You're left with ; and :. Of the two, ; is more visible and easier to type. So ; it is.
For what it's worth, there's a precedence for it in formal, legal-style writing. UN resolutions, for example, are always written as a single sentence[1].
It makes sense when you think of an entire resolution (program) as a single goal (output/result), which involves many separate steps/clauses (statements) that need to be executed.
A period is a terminator; it says 'This thought ends here', while a semicolon is a delimiter (ie, the clauses it separates are independent grammatically, but not contextually).
I have seen the same thing in mayoral declarations or the like.
Whereas John Q. Doe is an upstanding citizen who has contributed to the city, and
Whereas aforementioned Mr. Doe is an awesome dude, and
Whereas some people who happened to contribute to my campaign are fans of Mr. Doe,
Therefore, I, Mayor Wile E. Coyote do hereby declare Octember 31st, 2012 as John Q. Doe Day in the city of Acme, CO.
In this context, the UN resolution is actually similar to the comma-style used here by Twitter. We don't want the statement/sentence to end, so we use semicolons/commas to make it continue, and end up breaking browsers/non-lawyer readers.
C, Pascal, and ALGOL (1958) use semicolons as a statement delimiter. Why was the semicolon chosen instead of, say, the period or newline? BCPL (like JS and Go) allows semicolons to be omitted if a statement ends unambiguously on one line.
Was the semicolon a QWERTY home row key before or after ALGOL?