On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:59 pm, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2016-06-26, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote: > >> (Note, for those who don't know (old) Fortran, that spaces and tabs are >> not significant. So those dots are needed, otherwise "a eq b" would be >> parsed as "aeqb".) > > I've always been baffled by that. > > Were there other languages that did something similar? > > Why would a language designer think it a good idea? > > Did the poor sod who wrote the compiler think it was a good idea?
I don't know if it was a deliberate design decision or not, but I don't believe that it survived very many releases of the Fortran standard. Remember that Fortran was THE first high-level language. Its creator, John Backus, was breaking new ground and doing things that had never been done before[1], so the things that we take for granted about high-level programming languages were still being invented. If early Fortran got a few things wrong, we shouldn't be surprised. Also the earliest Fortran code was not expected to be typed into a computer. It was expected to be entered via punched cards, which eliminates the need for spaces. [1] Almost. He has previously created a high-level assembly language, Speedcoding, for IBM, which can be considered the predecessor of Fortran. -- Steven “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
