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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings
Date: Mon, 20 May 2024 11:10:55 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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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.

>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
-- 
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>