Spent 4 hours debugging a missing semicolon in my code last night

I was at my desk in my apartment around 11pm, building a simple calculator in Python for my first project, and it kept throwing a syntax error on line 12. Turns out I forgot a semicolon in a spot that didn't need one (which I didn't even know was possible) and it broke the whole loop. Has anyone else spent way too long hunting down a tiny mistake like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

elizabeth_williams1d ago

Spent 4 hours debugging a missing semicolon" - but here's the thing, you said Python. Python doesn't use semicolons to end lines, you only need them if you're putting multiple statements on the same line. So if you added one where it didn't belong, that might have actually caused the error instead of fixing it. Maybe the real issue was something else on line 12, like indentation or a missing colon. I say this because I once spent three hours blaming a comma in the wrong place when my actual problem was a typo in a variable name.

angelaellis1d ago

Oh man, @elizabeth_williams is totally right about Python not needing semicolons for line endings. But here's something nobody else mentioned yet - maybe you were confusing Python with JavaScript or C syntax in your head. I've done that before, switching between languages and accidentally using the wrong rules. If you're learning Python after trying another language first, that semicolon habit can sneak in. Also, if you were writing code from a tutorial that used semicolons in a different context, like inside a lambda or comprehension, that could mess things up too. My advice is to double check that the semicolon was the root cause and not just a symptom of a different error higher up in your code. Sometimes a simple typo on line 5 can cause a weird error on line 12 that looks like it's the wrong problem.