OT: Punctuation-starved Programming Languages

On 6/22/2006 at 8:03 AM Rob O'Donnell wrote: AFAIK, COBOL still requires a period after paragraph names. Prior to ANSI85 COBOL, a period was necessary inside of a conditional as a terminator. ANSI85 introduced the END-IF word, which could be used in place of the required period (just a case of using a word instead of punctuation). The need for a period to terminate a conditional (e.g. IF) was the result of the following general syntax: IF <condition> <statement-list>. In other words, IF BIG-NUMBER GREATER 100 DISPLAY "HOWDY" ADD 1 TO HIT-COUNT. In ANSI85 COBOL, the period could be replaced with END-IF. This was a nasty bit of inherited syntactical grief from earlier versions of COBOL. In retrospect, requiring some sort of conjunction before each statement in an IF statement list would have made more sense. e.g.: IF BIG-NUMBER GREATER 100 THEN DISPLAY "HOWDY" THEN ADD 1 TO HIT-COUNT ... But backward compatibility was required so the old syntax stayed. In general, you used periods only where needed, as they could be troublemakers otherwise. Consider the above statement with a period after "HOWDY"--the whole sense of the fragment is changed. IIRC, some compilers required a period at the end of the last statement in a paragraph also. Cheers, Chuck