Item — HN Reader

If someone grabs the code to try to reproduce the error and gets unrelated sytanx errors, that's their time wasted. The comment about the error helps others from wasting their time too... until the problem is fixed.

As there is a taboo of modifying someone else's code, this is best done with a comment and hope the OP will fix it.

1 comments

Yeah, well, that's a good point too. That's another possibility.

At any rate, whether the reason for someone to point out a missing semicolon is because they couldn't run the code straight away, or only because they didn't bother to read the question carefully - I fail to see why either scenario would be specific to StackOverflow and its peculiar community.

Surely on any QA site in existence you could come across someone acting on either of these possible reasons??