While working on the grammar for my programming language, Lilac, I was exploring different choices for statement terminators. . is very appealing, or !. Ultimately, I might make the "boring" choice of using either ; or significant whitespace. But that had me asking: why is it that so many languages use semicolons for their statement terminators1? I found some good reading about why we have statement terminators at all, but little discussion on the specific merits of semicolons over other choices...