Why use the colon before the type in a VAR declaration, and why have the vertical bar as a case separator rather than a semicolon?
A. These are both “syntactic sugar” to help the compiler know what it’s doing. For instance, if there were no colon in a type declaration, the compiler would not know the last identifier is supposed to be a type name because it wouldn’t know it was last until checking the next token. Lookaheads are expensive. Also, there was no need for subsequent committees and designers to change this from Wirth’s definition. After all, there is no ambiguity here.
