mmooss • 5 days ago

Semicolons are used by people who find highly nested code to be natural and necessary; they add another level to the outline. I love semicolons and couldn't write without them.

2
kranner • 5 days ago

But the phrase after the semicolon is at the same level as the initial phrase (I would have loved to employ nesting with parentheses while writing in natural language (though I restrict myself to one level when writing for others (but not at all in private writing)))?

2 replies
thaumasiotes • 5 days ago

Well, not always; one prominent use of semicolons is as the delimiter of an outer list of inner, comma-delimited lists. They're also used in a similar-but-not-quite-identical way to delimit lists in which the items are extremely long.

    To qualify for [some involved definition], the situation must satisfy:
    
    (1) Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah; AND

    (2) Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah; AND
    
    (3) either
    
      (a) Blah blah blah blah; OR
      
      (b) Blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah.
This is essentially the same idea as defining an ASCII "record separator": you have data that is difficult to distinguish from ordinary delimiters, so you hope that by using a rare, exotic delimiter, the problem will go away.

mmooss • 4 days ago

> But the phrase after the semicolon is at the same level as the initial phrase

If you mean my sentence in the GP, here's how I think it parses:

  A1 ; A2 . B
The two clauses in the first sentence, connected by the semicolon, are ~equal - but they are subparts of concept A. Concept B is separate and in a separate sentence. If I used no semicolon, I'd have three sentences and there would be no subparts, only

  A . B . C

1 reply
kranner • 4 days ago

That's how I had parsed it also. But to me adding another level in the outline sounded as if you had meant:

  A (B) . C

1 reply
mmooss • 2 days ago

Maybe I should have written,

  A(1;2) . B

wodenokoto • 5 days ago

I don't think that is a "soft period" as parent is saying is the use of semicolons. I think it is - as the name implies - a semi colon. Or a soft colon, if you will.

It could sooner be replaced by a colon than a full stop. And I agree with your usage.

> Semicolons are used by people who find highly nested code to be natural and necessary: They add another level to the outline.

1 reply
mmooss • 5 days ago

> It could sooner be replaced by a colon than a full stop.

Use it as you like, of course, but by the rules of grammar that is quite misleading. A semicolon must separate (or connect) two independent clauses, just like a period; a colon has many uses. Here is the Chicago Manual of Style:

"A colon introduces an element or a series of elements illustrating or amplifying what has preceded the colon. Between inde­pendent clauses it functions much like a semicolon (see 6.56), and in some cases either mark may work as well as the other; use a colon spar­ingly, however, and only to emphasize that the second clause illustrates or amplifies the first. (The colon usually conveys or reinforces the sense of "as follows"; see also 6.64.) The colon may sometimes be used instead of a period to introduce a series of related sentences (as in the third ex­ample below)."