11 May
2005
11 May
'05
3:14 p.m.
At 01:38 PM 5/11/2005, Tom Jennings wrote:
Oh yeah, it has !TERRIBLE! features in it! Computed
gotos are one
of the more amusing, and some of the side effects of it are just
plain bizarre.
The inverted syntax of "goto 60 if expression" was another
that caught my eye; it certainly reproduced in BASIC+ and today
still lives in Perl for the same ancestral reasons.
But you have to feel for the poor bastards, trying to
work out
these issues where you don't even have a character mapping you can
rely on. All the quoting/escaping bizarreness, that the unix Algol
interpreter a60 supports. Ugh.
One of the aforementioned references points out that Algol preceded
ASCII and influenced its development. At one point, they wanted
'do' and other keywords to be their own character (!) so you
could have 'do' as a variable name?
Algol, of course, lives on in Algore, an early supporting
component of the Internet.
- John