because some languages allow you to write statements that wrap over multiple lines in order to space things out that would otherwise be crammed onto one line, so for the compiler to know when the statement ends a character is needed so that it doesn't think the next line is part of the previous; statement number 2 goes here Without that semicolon, you might have continued to read "previous statement" which makes sense at first, until the words that follow. Without the allowance for multiple lines in one statement, that second physical line makes no sense at all, despite the first one making perfect sense on its own. And without the spacing, the run-on sentence would be a lot harder to read. Sometimes you have to write code a particular way. Here I was making a point. In a programming language there are other reasons.