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
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