Re: Semicolon's for all

Ari Luotonen (luotonen@ptsun00.cern.ch)
Wed, 12 Jan 94 12:44:27 +0100


Rob McCool feeling sorry for me:
> I feel sorry for Ari, wherever he is, getting back to all 3000 lines of this
> argument.

I'm back, I've just been quiet watching you handle it very well :-)

As for the whole discussion about semicolons et al, I'm against it
simply because it makes scripts non-seemless. I may have a huge
amount of some information in some format, lets take a simple example
of httpd log files. I have what seem to be files:

/httpd/statistics/1993/Dec/ByHost.html
/httpd/statistics/1993/Dec/ByDomain.html
/httpd/statistics/1993/Dec/ByDocument.html

I may first implement this as a script that takes the year (1993),
month (Dec) and target format (ByWhatEver.html) as its arguments,
and generates it from a single file stored somewhere is some format.

Two months later I'll notice, oh shit, this wastes *so*much* CPU
time -- I'll just create these files after the end of each month.

Two years later I naturally run out of disk space, and also know
that only the few latest months are usually referenced. So I'll
remove all the By*.html files execpt this year's ones, and
reintroduce my statistics script to generate older ones from a
single compressed log file.

This would be a mess with semicolons going back and forth.

I don't care if someone starts using these ;'s in his or her
URLs, especially as it is CGI/1.0 compliant as Rob mentioned,
for my server the rule file can certainly be used to strip
them away anyway, if necessary. But always requiring ; to
terminate the script name is bad.

The example above is what I regard as the most important aspect
of scripts, and it would kill me to see it destroyed.

-- Cheers, Ari --