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From: Richard Maine <Richard.Maine@nasa.gov>
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Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 13:55:31 -0700
To: Dick Hendrickson <dick.hendrickson@att.net>
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Subject: (SC22WG5.3041) Statement separation/termination
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Dick Hendrickson writes:
 > > The restriction just doesn't make
 > > any sense.  It doesn't follow from any of the preceding discussion
 > > in the interp.
 > 
 > I think the restriction against a leading ";" was a reaction to 
 > some discussions, either on the J3 e-mail list or in 
 > comp.lang.fortran about what a null statement would be....

Exactly.  But that applies *ONLY* to the initial line - not a
continuation line.  That is exactly the point that I think was
overlooked by whoever wrote the words of the interp.  On a
continuation line, in particularly with the example that Walt posted,
there is no potential "null statement" in sight anywhere.  That's why
I claim that the restriction does not follow from the discussion.

It is just a complete nonsequitur.  The discussion would justify
having the restriction the way it is in Walt's f95 handbook, saying
that you can't have a leading ";" *EXCEPT* on a continuation line.
Indeed, that part of the restriction follows from the other text (and
thus probably should have been a note instead of normative text,
except that we didn't have notes in f90).

Restricting against a leading ";" on a continuation line doesn't
follow from anything.

I agree that allowing null statements adds extra "issues" (perhaps
ones we might want to address, but at least it isn't trivial and
might have impacts on some things like error detection).  Deleting
the restriction against leading ";" on a continuation line doesn't
have any such issues.

Recall that Walt's example was something like (not in front of me
right now, but the gist of it was)

   x = 1.0 &
      ; y = 2.0

There is no null statement there.  The ";" terminates the x=1.0
statement...or it would if we didn't arbitrarily say that it was
disallowed.

-- 
Richard Maine                |  Good judgment comes from experience;
Richard.Maine@nasa.gov       |  experience comes from bad judgment.
                             |        -- Mark Twain