in reply to xemacs el code to check for ";"

You mean you want to have (X)emacs to test for the ';' at the end of every line of your code or at the end of the file?

By all means, a pretty straightforward way to test whether a line of code (or even an entire block) was syntactically correct is to start to type a new line by C-j (newline-and-indent) and check the indentation of the new line. If there were problems then the new line will be erroneously indented. It sorts of work for me...

By the way, you use cperl-mode, don't you?

Update: fixed typo

rg0now