22 Jun
2006
22 Jun
'06
4:37 p.m.
On 6/22/2006 at 10:44 AM Christian Corti wrote:
Algol's syntax constists of symbols like
'<-' ';' and so on. If you read
e.g. the book from the Alcor group you will see that they tell you, in
case that there are no '<-' etc. you may use more primitive symbols to
represent them, e.g.
I remember this very vividly when exploring Algol-60 and having at my
disposal only an 026 keypnch and a 6-bit character set. Another
not-so-subtle aspect was the restriction to uppercase alphabetics. Those
pretty programs in the Algol spec tended not to look as pretty when
rendered into uppercase and di- and tri-graphs.
In fact, I wonder if the restriction to 6-bit character sets and keypunches
with small keyboards was a reason that older languages tended to omit too
much punctuation. I can remember wanting to punch a FORTRAN program and
having only a nonprinting 024 keypunch at my disposal. Multipunch city.
Many shops kept some of their 026 keypunches when S/360 and EBCIDIC came in
(apparently 029's cost more to lease). Manually punching EBCIDIC
punctuation could get to be very slow going.
In fact, if you took your program deck down to the unit record room to be
duplicated on the 519 and interpreted on the 557, you got a double whammy.
The 557 not only printed wide characters (IIRC only 60 across the top of a
card), but lacked all but the simplest punctuation, reducing your program
to gibberish printed across the top of the card in two rows.
Cheers,
Chuck