Path: ...!news.nobody.at!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Stephen Fuld" Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings Date: Mon, 20 May 2024 01:14:38 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 50 Message-ID: References: <2024May19.175249@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <9a6583437121418f0b8446fd6d979461@www.novabbs.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Mon, 20 May 2024 03:14:38 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="9de988b11620f2279f9feaf953dab817"; logging-data="3836551"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/YahQSSf979r/ceCMsDddNT/vQXjdVHEI=" User-Agent: XanaNews/1.21-f3fb89f (x86; Portable ISpell) Cancel-Lock: sha1:CePqnlKXe5CJbNGXRd4Q8yiSq1A= Bytes: 2914 MitchAlsup1 wrote: > John Levine wrote: > > > According to Stephen Fuld : > > > > 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. Now, the mistake is obvious. > > > COBOL is older than Fortran, and back in the day there were plenty > > of people who were outraged at I=I+1 which is mathematically absurd > > for the > > physicicts and mathematicians who were Fortran's early users. > > > Algol gave us various kinds of := which were supposed to be better. > > > > Yes, the COMPUTE statement. i.e. COMPUTE I = I + 1 > > > You could do that, but I think this is at least as clear: > > > ADD 1 TO PRODUCT-INDEX. > > > 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. > > > Picture data structures ?? I'm not sure what you are saying here. While Picture clauses are not in C nor C++, John never cleamed they were. His clain was that those features that were included came from COBOL. e.g. nested structs, array of structs, structs of arrays, etc. And I miss some equivalent of picture clauses in C every time I see, including in this NG, a number consisting of a string of say 8 or 9 or more digits without the every three digit separator character, which sure makes reading such numbers easier. :-( -- - Stephen Fuld (e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)