Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> writes: > On 2016-06-26, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: > >> (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?
Probably a lot at that time. > Why would a language designer think it a good idea? Because when you punch characters one by one on a card, you quickly get bored with less-than-useful spaces. > Did the poor sod who wrote the compiler think it was a good idea? I don't know, but he has a good excuse: he was one of the first to ever write a compiler (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler, the section on History). You just called John Backus a "poor sod". Think again. -- Alain. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
