Re: silly question: prefix vs postfix ops

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:06:11 -0800

          From comp.compilers

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From: glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:06:11 -0800
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 08-03-012 08-03-018
Keywords: design, history, comment
Posted-Date: 04 Mar 2008 08:16:52 EST

Marco van de Voort wrote:
(snip)


> [This is wandering away from compiler design. Personal syntax
> preferences are almost invariably off-topic. -John]


Well, that is the question:


How many features of modern programming languages are due to the way
things were done in the first Fortran compiler?


Which of those features were done that way because it made it easier
to write the compiler? Now it is back to compiler design.


-- glen
[Now, now, let's not be hasty. Plenty of features have nothing to do
with Fortran. They're due to the way COBOL worked. And a few are
even attributable to Algol60, which in retrospect was phenomenally
lucky that all but one of the things they invented turned out to be
possible to implement efficiently, and the one that wasn't was a
mistake. -John]


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