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From: mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
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Subject: Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings
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Anton Ertl wrote:

> John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
>>According to Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:
>>>> That may have been the idea, but I think the idea was wrong. 
>>>
>>>I think few would disagree with both parts of that.  I certainly
>>>wouldn't.  But I give the designers some slack as, in the late 1950s,
>>>there was lettle knowledge about programming languages to go on.

> Certainly.

>>>Now, the mistake is obvious.

> Maybe not so obvious.  Certainly, as the start of this discussion
> shows, the idea that a programming language should orient itself
> towards the native language of a person is not yet universally
> considered a mistake.

> Anyway, such mistakes are valuable as we now can say that this idea
> was tried, and did not catch on.  Ok, this might be due to programming
> language designers not liking the idea while it was popular with
> programmers, but given that programmers language designers tend to
> also be programmers, and many programmers have designed another
> programming language if they did not like what they are given, I doubt
> that.

>>COBOL is older than Fortran

> According to Wikipedia, COBOL was designed in 1959.  A draft of the
> FORTRAN specification was completed in 1954, a manual appeared in
> 1956, and the compiler was delivered in 1957.  COBOL also looks
> syntactically more modern, with something BNF-like already leading to
> excessive syntax, whereas Fortran's approach to white space makes it
> obvious that the modern (i.e., post-FORTRAN) division into scanning an
> parsing had not been developed yet and had not affected the syntax.

       DO 400 I = 10

Is an assignment statement assigning the variable DO400I the value of
10

>>Don't forget that while COBOL's control structures were quite weak,
>>its data structures still look pretty good.  Everything in a C or C++
>>structure comes from COBOL by way of PL/I.

> And Algol 68.

> - anton