Why is semicolon allowed in this python snippet?

Question

Python does not require semi-colons to terminate statements. Semi colons can be used to delimit statements if you wish to put multiple statements on the same line.

Now, why is this allowed? It's a simple design decision. I don't think Python needs this semi-colon thing, but somebody thought it would be nice to have and added it to the language.

http://docs.python.org/reference/compound_stmts.html

Compound statements consist of one or more ‘clauses.’ A clause consists of a header and a ‘suite.’ The clause headers of a particular compound statement are all at the same indentation level. Each clause header begins with a uniquely identifying keyword and ends with a colon. A suite is a group of statements controlled by a clause. A suite can be one or more semicolon-separated simple statements on the same line as the header, following the header’s colon, or it can be one or more indented statements on subsequent lines. Only the latter form of suite can contain nested compound statements; the following is illegal, mostly because it wouldn’t be clear to which if clause a following else clause would belong:

if test1: if test2: print x

Also note that the semicolon binds tighter than the colon in this context, so that in the following example, either all or none of the print statements are executed:

if x < y < z: print x; print y; print z 

Summarizing:

compound_stmt ::=  if_stmt
                   | while_stmt
                   | for_stmt
                   | try_stmt
                   | with_stmt
                   | funcdef
                   | classdef
                   | decorated
suite         ::=  stmt_list NEWLINE | NEWLINE INDENT statement+ DEDENT
statement     ::=  stmt_list NEWLINE | compound_stmt
stmt_list     ::=  simple_stmt (";" simple_stmt)* [";"]

Python uses the ; as a separator, not a terminator. You can also use them at the end of a line, which makes them look like a statement terminator, but this is legal only because blank statements are legal in Python -- a line that contains a semicolon at the end is two statements, the second one blank.

Semicolon in the interpreter

Having read the answers, I still miss one important aspect of using semicolons, possibly the only one where it really makes a difference...

When you're working in an interpreter REPL (the Python interactive shell, IDLE, ipython) the value of the last expression is printed to the screen and usually this is the intended behavior.

Using an expression for side effects

But in some cases you want to evaluate an expression for its side effects only, e.g., to see the results of your simulation plotted by matplotlib.

In this cases you (probably) don't want to see the screenful of reprs of matplotlib objects that are sometimes returned by a call to a matplotlib function and, in IPython at least, one of the possibilities you have is to append a semicolon to the overly verbose statement, now IPython sees the input line as composed by two expressions, the matplotlib invocation and a null statement, so that the value of the compound expression is None and nothing is printed to the screen by the interpreter (the other possibility being assignment, as in _ = plot(...) but I find that a bit more intrusive).

Personal remark

IMHO, the use of the semicolon to suppress not desired output in the interpreter has become more relevant following the introduction of the IPyton notebook, that permits to save the input and the output, including graphical output, of an interpreter session for documentation and eventual reuse.

As everyone else has noted, you can use semicolons to separate statements. You don't have to, and it's not the usual style.

As for why this is useful, some people like to put two or more really trivial short statements on a single line (personally I think this turns several trivial easily skimmed lines into one complex-looking line and makes it harder to see that it's trivial).

But it's almost a requirement when you're invoking Python one liners from the shell using python -c '<some python code>'. Here you can't use indentation to separate statements, so if your one-liner is really a two-liner, you'll need to use a semicolon. And if you want to use other arguments in your one-liner, you'll have to import sys to get at sys.argv, which requires a separate import statement. e.g.

python -c "import sys; print ' '.join(sorted(sys.argv[1:]))" 5 2 3 1 4
1 2 3 4 5

I realize I am biased as an old C programmer, but there are times when the various Python conventions make things hard to follow. I find the indent convention a bit of an annoyance at times.

Sometimes, clarity of when a statement or block ends is very useful. Standard C code will often read something like this:

for(i=0; i<100; i++) {
    do something here;
    do another thing here;
}

continue doing things;

where you use the whitespace for a lot of clarity - and it is easy to see where the loop ends.

Python does let you terminate with an (optional) semicolon. As noted above, that does NOT mean that there is a statement to execute followed by a 'null' statement. SO, for example,

print(x);
print(y);

Is the same as

print(x)
print(y)

If you believe that the first one has a null statement at the end of each line, try - as suggested - doing this:

print(x);;

It will throw a syntax error.

Personally, I find the semicolon to make code more readable when you have lots of nesting and functions with many arguments and/or long-named args. So, to my eye, this is a lot clearer than other choices:

if some_boolean_is_true:
    call_function(
        long_named_arg_1,
        long_named_arg_2,
        long_named_arg_3,
        long_named_arg_4
    );

since, to me, it lets you know that last ')' ends some 'block' that ran over many lines.

I personally think there is much to much made of PEP style guidelines, IDEs that enforce them, and the belief there is 'only one Pythonic way to do things'. If you believe the latter, go look at how to format numbers: as of now, Python supports four different ways to do it.

I am sure I will be flamed by some diehards, but the compiler/interpreter doesn't care if the arguments have long or short names, and - but for the indentation convention in Python - doesn't care about whitespace. The biggest problem with code is giving clarity to another human (and even yourself after months of work) to understand what is going on, where things start and end, etc.

A quote from "When Pythons Attack"

Don't terminate all of your statements with a semicolon. It's technically legal to do this in Python, but is totally useless unless you're placing more than one statement on a single line (e.g., x=1; y=2; z=3).