27 Feb
2003
27 Feb
'03
10:47 a.m.
Gosh, I had /no/ idea that Fortran was a "column-sensitive" programming
language; I thought that COBOL was the only one...
What other languages are column sensitive? I'd guess at APL, but I'm sure
there are others.
--
Cheers, Ade.
Be where it's at, B-Racing!
http://b-racing.com
27 Feb
27 Feb
10:57 a.m.
Adrian Vickers wrote:
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).
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.
Eric
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. 
5:08 p.m.
On 28/2/03 12:53 am, "Eric Smith" <eric(a)brouhaha.com> wrote:
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.
OCCAM has this behaviour, too.
Sent using the Entourage X Test Drive.
8:21 p.m.
RPG (Very column oriented!)
SNOBOL
Most assembly languages
Almost all computer languages have some positional requirements built into
their syntax.
Douglas Wood
Software Engineer
dbwood(a)kc.rr.com
ICQ#: 143841506
Home of the EPICIS Development System for the PIC
http://epicis.piclist.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Myers" <tim.myers(a)sunplan.com>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 1:04 AM
Subject: Re: Fortran
On 28/2/03 12:53 am, "Eric Smith"
<eric(a)brouhaha.com> wrote:
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.
OCCAM has this behaviour, too.
Sent using the Entourage X Test Drive. 
28 Feb
28 Feb
5:39 a.m.
Hi,
"Eric Smith" <eric(a)brouhaha.com> said:
Adrian Vickers wrote:
ISTR CESIL as being column sensitive, and some early BASICs required
the keyword (only one per statement) to begin in column 6.
I used to occasionally use NCC Filetab which reqired some things to
be in the correct column.
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb(a)dial.pipex.com
The future was never like this!
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).
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.
4:11 p.m.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Eric Smith wrote:
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.
Crazy! I know nothing of Python but that just sounds intriguing.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
* Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
27 Feb
27 Feb
11 a.m.
On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Adrian Vickers wrote:
Gosh, I had /no/ idea that Fortran was a
"column-sensitive" programming
language; I thought that COBOL was the only one...
What other languages are column sensitive? I'd guess at APL, but I'm sure
there are others.
APL doesn't care.
C is certainly NOT column sensitive, EXCEPT that many/some compilers
demand that pre-processor directives (#define, #include) be left
justified.
28 Feb
28 Feb
1:42 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" once stated:
APL doesn't care.
C is certainly NOT column sensitive, EXCEPT that many/some compilers
demand that pre-processor directives (#define, #include) be left
justified.
True to an extent, but even modern C compilers expect the '#' to be in the
first column, while the rest of the directive can be indented, so my code
(when I nest directives) tend to look like:
#ifndef CGILIB
# ifdef DDT
# define D(x) x
# else
# define D(x)
# define NDEBUG
# endif
# include <assert.h>
# define ddt assert
# ifndef FALSE
# define FALSE 0
# endif
# ifndef TRUE
# define TRUE !FALSE
# endif
#else
# include "types.h"
# include "ddt.h"
#endif
(The code this was pulled from can be used stand alone (where I define some
constants) or used in a much larger project (where the defines I do define
here are defined in types.h and ddt.h)).
I find this easier to follow then if everything was flushed left.
-spc (And aren't most assemblers column sensitive too?)
2:19 a.m.
New subject: Position sensitive languages (was Re: Fortran)
--- Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc(a)conman.org> wrote:
It was thus said that the Great "Fred Cisin
(XenoSoft)" once stated:
.
.
.
I have seen that and it works most places. I have also worked with
compilers that do *not* want to see any whitespace between the #
and the directive (stupid parsers)
...many/some [C] compilers demand that
pre-processor directives
be left justified.
True to an extent, but even modern C compilers expect the '#' to be in
the first column, while the rest of the directive can be indented, so
my code (when I nest directives) tend to look like:
#ifndef CGILIB
# ifdef DDT
# define D(x) x
# else I find this easier to follow then if everything was
flushed left.
Agreed. I use it where possible.
-spc (And aren't most assemblers column
sensitive too?)
Sometimes. The ones I've used (6502 and 68000 mostly) don't like to
see instructions on the far left, but you aren't required to space
over 6 or 8 cols just to get past the labels. It kinda depends on
when the assembler itself was written. I've seen some really stupid
ones for the 6502 written in BASIC. :-P
-ethan
3:26 p.m.
At 00:43 02/28/2003 +0000, you wrote:
Gosh, I had /no/ idea that Fortran was a
"column-sensitive" programming
language; I thought that COBOL was the only one...
RPG is, but I only saw that enough to cringe... :-O ;-)
What other languages are column sensitive? I'd
guess at APL, but I'm sure
there are others.
Mmmm... nope. APL is about the least sensitive of all the languages... it's
not syntax sensitive (it has none! it borrows a lot of greek characters and
symbols to make the language... AAMAF, I'm suprised it didn't get mentioned
earlier during the "multi-lingual" language discussion, since it doesn't
have a language to translate...) It's not logic sensitive, either... just
look at any 20+ line APL program [you wrote] 12 months into the future...
it'll take you longer to figure out how you wrote it, than it would take to
rewrite it!
;-)
Beyond that, I wouldn't know what other column sensitive proggies are out
there...
Cheers, Ade.
Prost, "Merch"
6:48 p.m.
>What other languages are column sensitive? I'd
guess at APL, but I'm
> sure there are others.
Roger Merchberger wrote:
Mmmm... nope. APL is about the least sensitive of all
the languages...
Not quite. APL does basically require that a statement be confined
to one line of input, though the line can potentially be quite long.
So it's not completely free-form like some languages.
it's not syntax sensitive (it has none!
It most certainly does have syntax, though it's quite simple.
And it's quite easy to get syntax errors. But because most characters
can serve as both monadic and dyadic functions, it's also possible to
have a typo that is valid syntax but does something quite different
than what you intended.
28 Feb
28 Feb
6:23 a.m.
About APL, ...
Eric Smith wrote:
It most certainly does have syntax, though it's
quite simple.
And it's quite easy to get syntax errors. But because most characters
can serve as both monadic and dyadic functions, it's also possible to
have a typo that is valid syntax but does something quite different
than what you intended.
So this is not a syntax question, but a semantic one. Similar with
FORTRAN: assume you wanted to write
DO 20 I = 1,5
WRITE (LUNUTO, 10)
10 FORMAT (' Hello world!')
20 CONTINUE
which happens to be a loop that outputs the text from the FORMAT
statement five times, but put the first line slightly wrong like
DO 20 I = 1.5
then this line does not start a loop any more, but becomes a simple
assignment to a variable named DO20I, implicitly typed as REAL. This
happens because FORTRAN is, by definition, blind to spaces (!), except
in string constants.
Incidentally, many FORTRAN compilers require that the comma is on the
first line of a DO statement, while anything beyond it is allowed to be
on continuation lines.
Decades ago, I used to have a demo program that contained lots of things
like this, and whenever somebody claimed to be an experienced FORTRAN
programmer, I asked them to predict the output. Nobody ever got it right
completely.
Of course, many of the surprises were implementation dependant, and it
was impossible to port the program from TOPS-10 to VAX/VMS. The above
example, however, *is* portable. Just make sure LUNUTO (logical unit for
user terminal output) has a value that is appropriate for your favorite
operating system/compiler combo (e.g., for TOPS-10, LUNUTO=5, for VMS
LUNUTO=6).
--
Andreas Freiherr
Vishay Semiconductor GmbH, Heilbronn, Germany
http://www.vishay.com
10:21 a.m.
What other languages are column sensitive? I'd
guess at APL, but I'm sure
there are others.
I thought APL was pretty much free-form.
Occam is column sensitive. You start a block by indenting the lines 2
more spaces, and end the block by removing the indentation (this applies
to comments within the block as well, BTW). A _painful_ feature IMHO -- I
seemed to spend most of the time correcting indentation rather than
program logic bugs...
-tony
7736
days inactive
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14 comments
13 participants
participants (13)
-
Andreas.Freiherr＠Vishay.com -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
avickers＠solutionengineers.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
dbwood＠kc.rr.com -
erd_6502＠yahoo.com -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
gehrich＠tampabay.rr.com -
spc＠conman.org -
stanb＠dial.pipex.com -
tim.myers＠sunplan.com -
vcf＠siconic.com -
zmerch＠30below.com