W. eWatson wrote:
> I think PL/I, FORTRAN, ALGOL, etc. have reserved words.
Algol reserved syntactic tokens that resembled English words, but specified
that they should be written in a different way from programmer-defined
symbols, so no conflict was possible. Published algorithms might have the
tokens underlined or boldfaced. In the Algol-60 I used, the tokens had to
be enclosed in apostrophes. None of this applied to library subroutine
names; it was open season on those.
In FORTRAN and PL/I words were un-reserved to a degree that's really
bizarre. A short post can't begin to do it justice -- let's just mention
that IF and THEN could be variable names, and DO 100 I=1.10 . The syntaxes
were carefully crafted so that context completely determined whether a
symbol would be taken in a reserved sense or a programmer-defined sense, so
any possibility for conflict was a syntax error.
Mel.
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