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Not required doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea.

If they were never needed I'd understand, but sometimes they are. I don't see the point in forcing the developer to make a conscious decision on whether to include a semicolon.

Omitting semicolons also means that the correctness of a line of code is determined by the unrelated lines that follow.



While the virtues of semicolon insertion are highly debatable, developers are permitted by the ECMAScript standard to write code that relies on it. A tool like JSMin should be aware of semicolon insertion. ricardobeat put it very well elsewhere in this thread: "It is a bug on JSMin. Minifying should never alter code behaviour."


Actually JSMin is aware of semicolon insertion and handles it correctly.

They just disagree on whether a semicolon gets inserted here.


Unfortunately for JSMin, browsers attempt to implement at least the ECMAScript specification, not just "the good parts."




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