Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Otherwise you could try and fix the error, like the PL/1 F-level > compiler used to. This would usually work when all that was wrong was a > missing semicolon, but it frequently went completely berserk in other
Ah, yeah, I forgot that particularly endearing aspect of PL/I (to go with the language having no keywords) -- many compilers bent over backwards to double-guess what you meant, resulting in deep misunderstandings by many programmers about what the language was SUPPOSED to be, mysterious error messages and (worse!) program misbehavior, etc etc -- all, of course, at the price of making the compilers ever more intricate, bug-prone, extremely heavy in resource cosumption, slow, and laughably bad at optimization (when compared to compilers of the same era for sensibly SIMPLE languages, such as Fortran). Thanks for reviving the memories: it makes me SO ineffably glad that nowadays I'm using a language which, among its guiding principles, has "in the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess"!!!-) Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
