Fortran

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Thu Feb 27 18:57:00 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...

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
Received on Thu Feb 27 2003 - 18:57:00 GMT