27 Feb
2003
27 Feb
'03
11:26 a.m.
At 00:53 28/02/2003, you wrote:
Hmm, interesting concept; especially for a "current" language.
--
Cheers, Ade.
Be where it's at, B-Racing!
http://b-racing.com
Adrian Vickers wrote:
Shurely you jest?
I can *well* recall that COBOL (at least, the variant I used, which ran on
VAXen) had a requirement that:
Comments were marked by a * character in a specific column (5, IIRC)
Certain statement blocks were started by a statement starting in column 6
Statements subsurvient to that block had to be indented a further 4 or so
columns
All this is IIRC; but I *know* that a certain number of columns were reserved.
Gosh, I had /no/ idea that Fortran was a
"column-sensitive" programming
language; I thought that COBOL was the only one...
Um, COBOL isn't. It's free-form. Groups of COBOL statements are
called paragraphs, and in the early days were written just like paragraphs
of prose. Fortunately sanity eventually prevailed, and COBOL has for
many years now been mostly written with one statement per line (or less).
Maybe you used an older version than I did?
What other
languages are column sensitive? I'd guess at APL, but I'm
sure there are others.
No, no column sensitivity in APL.
RPG is *very* column sensitive, much more so than FORTRAN.
Python is sort of column sensitive. Nothing has to be in a specific
column, but the nesting is controlled by matching indentation, rather
than having begin/end tokens.