Re: problems with identifiers and keywords...

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
<snip>
> I am not quite sure about Fortran, but it seems no reserved words was
> intentional in PL/I. PL/I has a lot of keywords, and adopted some
> features from COBOL, a language known to have a very large list of
> reserved words, many of which could be convenient to use as
> identifiers. One goal of PL/I was that you shouldn't have to learn
> the whole language to use it, and so you also shouldn't have to learn
> the keywords for parts you don't use.
<snip>


My objection to languages that allow keywords as identifiers (not that
I've written any FORTRAN in a long time or a lot of PL/I at any time):


I would think that a program that used keywords as identifiers would
make sense to a programmer who didn't use the features that required
those keywords but would look strange to a programmer who used those
features regularly and therefore was not in the habit of using those
keywords as identifiers (if that makes sense). The author of the
program might even come to find the program awkward after learning
more of the language and recognizing more of the keywords as keywords.


Louis Krupp

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