Why the ; after do...while?

Question

Does anyone know why the semicolon is required after a do while loop? This is pointless to bother us programmers to have to type a semicolon that we shouldn't need to care about. If they took this requirement out of the syntax, like Javascript and Actionscript, that would make me happy because it would just be much cleaner and also get rid of a compile check that doesn't need to exist. It would even be backward compatible because all the old code that has a semicolon would just execute an empty statement after the do...while loop. Did Java just want to copy C or something here? They should have spared us all this ugly flaw from C. Sun, please, abstract this semicolon away from us!
UGLY
do {
System.out.println("Sun, please, abstract this semicolon away from us!");
} while(true); // <-- WHY!!? ='(BETTER ! !
do {
System.out.println("Sun, please, abstract this semicolon away from us!");
} while(true) // <-- look Sun, no semicolon! =)

Answer 1

It's the separator-terminator problem all over againI think it's more due to the fact that Java doesn't find any significance with new lines.No, it's the separator-terminator problem all over again. This is a well-known issue in compiler theory going back to the 1960s. Algol and Pascal came down on one side, PL/1 and C and C++ and Java on the other. All those languages are indifferent to newlines but the first two treat ; as a separator, the rest as terminators. The former is more logically consistent, but in practice the second has won the day.
Basically the argument goes 'every other statement in PL1/C/C++/Java/... is terminated by ;. Why should do .. while be any different?'.
The same applies to 'else'. Formally speaking the ; isn't required on a single statement before it:
if condition then
  statement
else
statement;In practice the Algol/Pascal rule that it isn't there just causes problems because it's an apparent inconsistency. Makes cutting and pasting difficult for example.