Weirdly, this kind of syntactic idiosyncrasy is something that got me interested in Erlang. Finally a language that uses full stops when a routine full stops. I find most of the rest of its syntax uncomfortable (I didn’t spend much time with the language, I’m sure it’s fine when you’re used to it), but I always found it weird to end a completed statement with a statement-list-joining punctuation mark.
I thought of mentioning the Prolog heritage. Weirdly CSS (having the worst syntax consistency of any language I can think of) is hyphen-heavy and solves its negation infix operator ambiguity well: it needs to be surrounded by whitespace.
For Prolog/Erlang, I think the preceding syntax is disambiguating enough
I always thought this is a Wirthism because Pascal ends unit and program with an "end." (with a dot), whereas function and procedure are terminated with "end;". (with a semicolon). I don't know about other Wirth languages though, maybe it is Pascal specific and not really something typical for Wirth?
Erlang is great, and I got used to the punctuation, but it's kind of a pain when you're moving code around.
Oh, now this is the last thing, gotta take off the ; or replace a , with a .
At least when I was starting out, I'd have loved a more C-like syntax with {} and consistently semicolons. Of course, Elixir came and just got rid of most punctuation, which I like less.
Anyway, it's consistent and after a couple weeks of messing it up, I can consistently see where the mistake is from the compiler error; after several years, I still sometimes mess it up, but oh well. I can't recall having messed up the punctuation so much that it still compiled but wasn't what I meant, so it's almost always quick to recover.
I mean, if you want to undo subtracting something, you add it? The only reason I ever found it confusing is that it was "backwards", but that feels like a forced error due to + requiring a shift while - doesn't.
You could ask Richard Stallman himself, who is well known for responding to random inquiries from people.
Presumably it was rejected because the whole point of POSIX was to consolidate, regularize, and simplify pre-existing practice. Adding "+" as an additional standard option signifier would take a huge step in the complete opposite direction. The only precedence for "+" would have been the `set` shell builtin, and AFAIU the committee only begrudgingly grandfathered that syntax.
Someone elsethread mentioned the `date` utility, but if you look at the BSD implementation "+" isn't used as an option marker, per se, but rather to disambiguate operand strings. The 2001 standard only defined the following:
date [−u] [+format]
date [−u] mmddhhmm[[cc]yy]
It's splitting hairs, but POSIX was at least able to shoehorn the legacy syntax into a more regularized base interface.
