Perl does not complain about missing semicolon

Question

I just found on my Ubuntu that Perl is not complaining about the semicolon at the end. Check the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict;  my @array = (1, 2, 3, 4);  foreach (@array) {     print $_."\n" }  print "no, this cant be true" 

Please notice that semicolon ";" is missing from the print statement. Still the code runs fine.

OUTPUT:

1 2 3 4 no, this cant be true 

If I put semicolon after print, it still works. So this is confusing to me.

Could you help me understand what am I missing here, OR is there some obvious Perl ideology that I overlooked?

Answer 1

From perldoc perlsyn:

Every simple statement must be terminated with a semicolon, unless it is the final statement in a block, in which case the semicolon is optional.

Your print statement is the last statement in a block.

Omitting the semi-colon isn't recommended though. It's too easy to forget to add it if you extend the block later.

Answer 2

I often think of semicolons in Perl as separators rather than terminators - that makes this behaviour a lot easier to get used to.

That said, it's not at all a bad idea to always use a semicolon as you don't have to remember to add it later if you put more statements at the end of the block, a bit like using an extra comma in a list so that you don't forget to add that later (Perl ignores the last comma if there's no list item after it).