OT: Punctuation-starved Programming Languages

On 6/21/2006 at 11:43 AM Don Y wrote: Back in the 60's and 70's there was a brief interest in "natural" programming languages that used English as a basis. The goal was to provide something that would be easy for an "average" person to use. As I recall, one used only a period (in many cases optional) and hyphen as punctuation. E.G; "Take the 50-th element of dog and multiply it by cat giving hamster. or some such. Not too far from COBOL, except that there was no reserved meaning attached to asterisks, plus and minus signs, etc. And, as far as each statement began with a reserved imperative verb, the period (full stop) was optional. Some special-purpose languages are fairly light on punctuation (e.g. RPG, GPSS). I suspect that there are a quite a few old fixed-field syntax languages out there that probably use no punctuation at all. Then, there are languages that are seemingly ALL punctuation, like APL. But, in fact, this is a largely artificial distinction. Most punctuation is simply abbreviation. C uses "{}" for the same thing that other languages use "BEGIN" and "END". One can use an asterisk to acomplish the same thing that MULTIPLY accomplishes in COBOL. I find it more interesting that the punctuators are at a definite disadvantage in that there is a limited set of punctuation characters that rarely cover all of the needed uses, meaning that overloading or di- and trigraphs are necessary. Sometimes, even this is hopeless. COBOL has no punctuation equivalent for "MOVE CORRESPONDING" or "EXAMINE", for example. Cheers, Chuck