I missed the necessity of ... having ; characters to terminate both the expression to be eval'ed and also the eval statement itself.

A ; (semicolon) is not necessary to terminate the last statement in a file, block, or an eval string derived from an expression; if any of these have only a single statement, no semicolon termination at all is necessary. The eval statement itself must be ;-terminated because other statements follow it.

Update: Another, more general and perhaps better way to put it is that every statement must be terminated, either by a semicolon or by the end of the block, file or eval string containing it. And, of course, extra semicolons have no effect.