Having semicolons introduces simple redundancy to the language. If you leave off semicolons you introduce more ambiguity, which can make error messages less clear since it&#x27;s less obvious to the compiler exactly what was the mistake the programmer made.<p>Think of it like a sliding scale: on the far extreme of no redundancy, a typo could be a runtime error instead of a compile error. On the far extreme of redundancy, you have to express your code twice in different ways. Having semicolons is a reasonable balance between the extremes.