[erlang-questions] Erlang Syntax - again

[James Hague]

Ah, this topic :)

First the trivia:
1. I'm on board with getting rid of 'if'.  I always had to stop and
think about whether I wanted 'if' or 'case' so now I use the latter
for everything.
2. Oh for swapping the meanings of "=:=" and "==".

Now the real issue: commas and semicolons.  It used to bother me, to
the point where I considered writing a preprocessor to convert from
indentation-based formatting, but I've since gotten used to it.  The
tricky part of indentation based syntax is that you can do stuff like
this:

[atom1, atom2, 2, case X of
   true -> ...
   false -> ...
end]

Python uses a continuation character at the end of the line, but yuck.
 It *would* be nice to get rid of semicolons and periods for top-level
function definitions, though.  That could be done without ambiguity
and mocked up via a Perl script in half an hour.

James