[erlang-questions] Newbie question about line endings

Fred Hebert mononcqc@REDACTED
Wed Dec 21 21:40:21 CET 2011


The simple answer is 'because Prolog did it that way first'. I have written
http://ferd.ca/on-erlang-s-syntax.html to give 2-3 different options on how
to read Erlang's line endings in a way that makes sense. Note that
considering them 'line ending' is a mistake in the first place. ',' and ';'
are separators (they go in-between expressions or constructs, not after
them). Only '.' terminates 'forms', which are function declarations and
module attributes '-KeyWord(Args)', and expressions in the shell.

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:21 PM, August Schwartzwald <
august.schwartzwald@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I started to learn Erlang about a month ago. I really like it and think
> that with some more practice it will become a both unique and powerful tool
> in my growing box of programming languages. However, there is one thing
> about it that I find extremely annoying: The line endings.
> I currently know 5 programing languages, they have either 0 (python) or 1
> way to end lines (usually the ';' character). Erlang totally stands out
> here and requires that lines are ended in one of 4 different ways.
>
> Did some googling without finding any good reason to why the language
> works in this way. Can anyone here explain this?
>
> Thanks
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