On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 7:30:05 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2016-06-26, BartC > > (Note, for those who don't know (old) Fortran, that spaces and tabs are > > not significant. So those dots are needed, otherwise "a eq b" would be > > parsed as "aeqb".) > > I've always been baffled by that. > > Were there other languages that did something similar? > > Why would a language designer think it a good idea? > > Did the poor sod who wrote the compiler think it was a good idea?
I think modern ideas like lexical analysis preceding parsing and so on came some decade after Fortran. My guess is that Fortran was first implemented -- 'somehow or other' Then these properties emerged -- more or less bugs that had got so entrenched that they had to be dignified as 'features' Analogy: Python's bool as 1½-class because bool came into python a good decade after python and breaking old code is a bigger issue than fixing control constructs to be bool-strict -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list