Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators

>[Lots of languages don't permit multiple statements per line.


IMO such languages date from the 50's or 60's, where programs were
punched into cards, and line numbers were required to allow for
sorting the cards after you stumbled and spread the cards all around
;-)


Even if the language specifications were not changed in later
revisions, most newer compilers allow for "free formatted" input. IMO
such extensions came into existence after moving from punched cards to
CRT's for code input and maintenance.


>Also, it seems to me that you want a language to have a certain amount of
>syntactic redundancy so that a typo or other small error is less
>likely to be something legal but not what you want, e.g. the notorious
>Fortran DO 10 I = 1.10 -John]


You're right, IMO every language should have such redundancy. Where
redundancy does not necessarily mean "more keystrokes", instead means
*unequivocal* keywords and other syntactical elements.


I shudder every time when reading somthing like "if (1 == somevar)";
that unnatural reversal of the arguments is recommended by many
people, to prevent against the usual "if (somevar = 1)" typo being
accepted by a C compiler.


DoDi

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.