According to the British writer on grammar, Lynne Truss, many non writers avoid the colon and semicolon for various reasons: "They are old-fashioned", "They are middle-class", "They are optional", "They are mysteriously connected to pausing", "They are dangerously addictive (vide Virginia Woolf)", and "The difference between them is too negligible to be grasped by the brain of man".
Example: : Με συγχωρείτε· πού είναι οι τουαλέτες; (Excuse me; where are the toilets?)
Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country (2005) stated: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." In response to Vonnegut and Truss, Ben MacIntyre, columnist in the Times of London, wrote: "Americans have long regarded the semi-colon with suspicion, as a genteel, self-conscious, neither-one-thing-nor-the other sort of punctuation mark, with neither the butchness of a full colon nor the flighty promiscuity of the comma. Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons."
In computer programming, the semicolon is often used to separate multiple statements (for example, in Perl, Pascal, PL/I, and SQL). In other languages, semicolons are called terminators and are required after every statement (such as in Java, and the C family). Other languages (for instance, some assembly languages and LISP dialects) use semicolons to mark the beginning of comments. Additionally, the semicolon stands for a NOP (no operation or null command) in C/C++, useful in busy waiting synchronization loops.
Example C++ code:
return 0; }
Conventionally, in many languages, each statement is written on a separate line, but this is not typically a requirement of the language. In the above example, two statements are placed on the same line; this is legal, since the semicolon separates the two statements.
The semicolon is often used to separate elements of a string of text. For example, multiple e-mail addresses in the "To" field in some e-mail clients have to be delimited by a semicolon.
The semicolon is commonly used as parts of emoticons, in order to indicate winking.
In Microsoft Excel, the semicolon is used as a list separator, especially in cases where the decimal separator is a comma, such as 0,32; 3,14; 4,50
, instead of 0.32, 3.14, 4.50
.
In MATLAB, the semicolon can be used as a row separator when defining a vector or matrix (whereas a comma separates the columns within a row of a vector or matrix) or to execute a command silently, without displaying the resulting output value in the console.
In HTML, a semicolon is used to terminate a character entity reference, either named or numeric.
In differential geometry, a semicolon preceding an index is used to indicate the covariant derivative of a function with respect to the coordinate associated with that index.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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