[erlang-questions] Newbie question about line endings

August Schwartzwald august.schwartzwald@REDACTED
Thu Dec 22 13:23:36 CET 2011


 I guess I'll digest your blog post for some time and see what comes out of
it. It's maybe just because I have never seen anything like it before that
I'm suspicious. :) Thanks!

2011/12/21 Fred Hebert <mononcqc@REDACTED>

> 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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>
>
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