Was helping somebody just yesterday on another site and they couldn't for the life of them figure out why their view was throwing a syntax error. The view started with a cte that had a leading semicolon. They claimed they had been wrestling the thing for a couple of days. I used Lynn's terminology that the semicolon is not a beginninator, but a terminator. And once they removed the semicolon their view was just fine. I don't know why the coding style of starting a cte became to be but it causes so much confusion.