On 27/06/2016 23:45, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
On Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 3:27:40 AM UTC+12, MRAB wrote:
On 2016-06-27 14:59, Grant Edwards wrote:
Why would a language designer think it a good idea?
It let you have identifiers like "grand total"; there was no need for
camel case or underscores to separate the parts of the name.
Another nifty thing (well, I thought so at the time) was that FORTRAN had no
reserved words.
Though I wondered, in statements like
FORMAT(...complex expression with lots of nested parentheses...) = ...
how much work the parser would have to do before deciding that it was an array
assignment, not a FORMAT statement?
You just design the compiler to do the same processing in each case, ie.
parse a <name> followed (<expression>), then mark the result AST
fragment as either an Array term, or Format statement, depending on what
follows, and whether the name is "format".
I suppose the compiler could decide to backtrack and re-parse based on
the knowledge that is one or the other, but that's a messy way of doing it.
--
Bartc
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