Nicolas Martyanoff on Nostr: With a configuration language, you must decide on how to end lines. With semicolons ...

With a configuration language, you must decide on how to end lines. With semicolons (e.g. NGINX) it is explicit but more verbose. Without them (e.g. Caddy or HAProxy) you must either forbid multiline statements (HAProxy does that, really annoying) or provide a specific construct.

A backslash character works, as in shell or Ruby. It's not pretty, but people are used to it.

The most important reason is that the vast majority of settings should be single line, so we should optimize for them.