Fortran

From: Adrian Vickers <avickers_at_solutionengineers.com>
Date: Thu Feb 27 19:26:00 2003

At 00:53 28/02/2003, you wrote:

>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.

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.


> 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.

Hmm, interesting concept; especially for a "current" language.

-- 
Cheers, Ade.
Be where it's at, B-Racing!
http://b-racing.com
Received on Thu Feb 27 2003 - 19:26:00 GMT

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