semicolon at beginning of line

[Elliott Forney]

I wish bash would happily execute lines that begin with a semicolon,
i.e., treat it as a no-op followed by a command.  The following
examples come to mind:

$ infloop& echo hello
[2] 11361
hello
$ infloop&; echo hello
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `;'

$ echo hello; echo world
hello
world
$ echo hello;; echo world
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `;;'

$ ; echo hello world
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `;'

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
  Elliott Forney