syntax - History of trailing comma in programming language grammars

Question

Many programming languages allow trailing commas in their grammar following the last item in a list. Supposedly this was done to simplify automatic code generation, which is understandable.

As an example, the following is a perfectly legal array initialization in Java (JLS 10.6 Array Initializers):

int[] a = { 1, 2, 3, };

I'm curious if anyone knows which language was first to allow trailing commas such as these. Apparently C had it as far back as 1985.

Also, if anybody knows other grammar "peculiarities" of modern programming languages, I'd be very interested in hearing about those also. I read that Perl and Python for example are even more liberal in allowing trailing commas in other parts of their grammar.

Answer 1

I'm not an expert on the commas, but I know that standard Pascal was very persnickity about semi-colons being statement separators, not terminators. That meant you had to be very very careful about where you put one if you didn't want to get yelled at by the compiler.

Later Pascal-esque languages (C, Modula-2, Ada, etc.) had their standards written to accept the odd extra semicolon without behaving like you'd just peed in the cake mix.