>>32
It's surprising how often in parsing you could make some tokens optional. I did my '$' commands without ","s origionally, but discovered I sometimes needed them. Doing my C+ compiler, too, I found spots for optional things. In a switch statement with "default:", I wasn't sure about the colon, at first.
Here's some wisdom: I took and motorola 6800-based asm class in school. Our instructor was an arrogant academic. He made the editor we used for our source code and it allowed paragraphs of comment documentation, next to the asm instructions and did not require semicolons between.
I decided he was an arrogant academic who got rid of semicolons just to show he could... and this idea was not very wise.
What if you have tools for static code analysis, for example.
God says...
C:\TEXT\WEALTH.TXT
s. When an artificer has acquired a
little more stock than is necessary for carrying on his own business
in supplying the neighbouring country, he does not, in North America,
attempt to establish with it a manufacture for more distant sale, but
employs it in the purchase and improvement of uncultivated land. From
artificer he becomes planter; and neither the large wages nor the easy
subsistence which that country affords to artificers, can bribe him
rather to work for other people than for himself.