I first read about the proposed semicolon operator a few weeks ago and, to be honest, I’m a bit surprised by the desire for it in C# if for no reason other than that C# isn’t an expression-based language. To me, this feature feels like another attempt to shoehorn functional approaches into an object-oriented language. If I understand the feature correctly, the idea is to allow variables to be defined within and scoped to an expression. The following snippet adapted from the language feature implementation status page shows the operator in action:

var result = (var x = Foo(); Write(x); x * x);

In this code, everything within the parentheses constitutes a single expression. The expression invokes Foo, assigns the result to x, passes x to the Write function, then returns the square of x, and ultimately assigns the square to result. Because x is scoped to the expression, it is not visible outside of the parenthesis. I think this seems a bit awkward in C# and what’s more, I don’t know what value it adds that functions don’t already give us. I haven’t really decided whether the above example is more readable or maintainable than if we’d defined a function called WriteAndSquare.

Interestingly, this capability already exists in F# (albeit in a slightly more verbose form) which isn’t really all that surprising since F# is an expression-based language.

let result =
  let x = Foo()
  printfn "%i" x
  x * x

Even in F# though, I think I’d still prefer factoring out the expression into a function.