Allow semicolons to separate statements

[wtholliday]

Statements in a block could only be separated by newlines. This accepts ; as an alternate separator so multiple statements can share a line.

main {
    var x = 1; var y = 2; var z = x + y
    while i < 3 { i = i + 1; x = x + i }
}

Implementation

One change in parse_block (src/parser.rs): the loop now continues on Token::Semi as well as Token::Endl.

The lexer already produced Token::Semi — it was used only for array types ([T; N]) and array repeat literals ([x; n]). Those are distinct contexts and are unaffected. A ; is now accepted anywhere a newline was accepted as a separator, including a trailing one before }. Since parse_block is shared, this covers function bodies, while/for bodies, if/else branches, and block expressions.

Semantics are otherwise unchanged: the semicolon is purely a separator, so unlike Rust a trailing one does not void the block's value — { a; b; } still evaluates to b, exactly like { a\n b\n }.

Tests

• tests/cases/semicolons.lyte — new golden test: multiple statements per line, trailing ;, a one-line while body, and semicolons inside a value-returning function. Verified on both the JIT and VM backends.
• test_parse_block in src/parser.rs — added { x; y }, { x; }, { x;\n y }, { x = y; z = w }, { var x = y; var z = w; f(x) }, { while x { y; z }; w }.

cargo test --workspace: 351 + 4 + 21 passed, 0 failed.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01QL98e281ffpSW7JKQyS87C