Semicolons vs. Commas

In the prototype descriptions of functions and lists we have tried to be consistent and use semicolons rather than commas as argument separators and as list separators. But there may be places in this documentation where we failed. Everywhere you see an argument separator or a list separator in this documentation you can use either a semicolon or a comma. But semicolons are preferable to commas because they are international.

If your application will always run only in the US you can use commas wherever you see a semicolon. But if you do, we predict the day will come when you will be sorry. There are major parts of the world where commas are the decimal separator (rather than the period) so the use of commas as an argument separator would be ambiguous since it is also used as the decimal separator. We can't tell you the number of times we have heard people cry on the other end of the telephone line when we told them that news. They never thought that their application would ever go international.

It isn't as bad as it could have been because they got to use the services of the XCHANGE command, but that is still a lot of work in a major application.

The best bet is to get into the habit of using semicolons as argument separators and as list separators (for example, when you are doing implied OR's in the FIND command).