If a blank is the token delimiter arbitrarily long tokens are possible even in such a romance language as Italian. I recently wrote a check on my Italian bank account for duemilanovecentoquarantadue (2942) euros. This twenty-seven character construct is longer than such often cited German words as Eisenbahnknotenpunkt, railroad junction, 20 characters, or Wahrscheinlichtkeitslehre, probability theory, 25 characters.
Parsing such Italian quantities is not, however, at all difficult. I routinely pose the problems of obtaining, say, centotrentadue from 132 and 132 from centotrentadue to students, and they routinely produce PL/I procedures that perform these two operations with great generality. Gerhard of course understands these issues very well. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
