On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 3:27:40 AM UTC+12, MRAB wrote: > On 2016-06-27 14:59, Grant Edwards wrote: >> Why would a language designer think it a good idea? >> > It let you have identifiers like "grand total"; there was no need for > camel case or underscores to separate the parts of the name.
Another nifty thing (well, I thought so at the time) was that FORTRAN had no reserved words. Though I wondered, in statements like FORMAT(...complex expression with lots of nested parentheses...) = ... how much work the parser would have to do before deciding that it was an array assignment, not a FORMAT statement? Then some FORTRAN dialects allowed constant definitions using syntax like PARAMETER N = 3 which broke the no-reserved-words convention. Luckily, this was standardized as the much less headache-inducing (for the compiler writer) PARAMETER(N = 3) PL/I (which was almost named “FORTRAN VI” at one stage) added significant whitespace, but managed to keep the no-reserved-words convention--almost. There was just one peculiar set of exceptions... -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list