In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Carl Banks" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Alex Martelli wrote: > > > IBM (PL/I's inventor and rabid defender) found out the hard way that > > making the parser more complicated, slow and bug-prone in order to allow > > such absurd obfuscation was NOT a popular trade-off -- despite IBM's > > alleged monopoly power, PL/I is now basically dead while the older, > > crankier languages that PL/I wanted to replace, Cobol and particularly > > Fortran, are still quite alive (and with reserved words ALWAYS reserved > > -- like in C, Python, Java, C#, Haskell, and basically every language > > that's even halfway sensible;-). > > Except Fortran doesn't have any reserved words either: > > PROGRAM KWDS > REAL REAL,WRITE > WRITE=1.0 > REAL=2.0 > WRITE(*,*)WRITE,REAL > END > > (Not sure whether it's true in Fortran 9x.) > > > Carl Banks As I remember, you didn't need the whitespace either. IIRC, your example above could have been written as: PROGRAMKWDS REALREAL,WRITE WRITE=1.0 REAL=2.0 WRITE(*,*)WRITE,REAL END and worked just as well. I have nightmares thinking about writing a fortran parser. Oh yeah, spaces were the same as zeros on input, too. What a wonderful language. Isn't it wonderful how nothing you write ever gets lost once google gets it's hands on it: http://mirrorspace.org/python/doc/humor/index.html#habits (personally, I think the one about the little girl buying a wabbit in the pet store is the best of the collection). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list