Highly desirable Make a semicolon optional at the end of the line, if there is a balance of brackets on the line and the statement looks syntactically correct ("soft semicolon", the solution used in famous IBM PL/1 debugging compiler).

Why would this be highly desirable? Consider:

print( "Hello World" )
    if( 1 );

[download]

versus

print( "Hello World" )
    if( 1 < 2 ) {
         print("Goodbye");
    };

[download]

Adding your change idea makes the parser even more complex and introduces weird edge cases.

I think even Javascript now recommends using semicolons instead of eliding them at the end of a line.

Update: Some examples where ASI in Javascript goes wrong:

In reply to Re: What esteemed monks think about changes necessary/desirable in Perl 7 outside of OO staff by Corion
in thread What esteemed monks think about changes necessary/desirable in Perl 7 outside of OO staff by likbez

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.