On Sun, 6 Mar 2022 17:39:51 +0100, "Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-pyt...@hjp.at>
declaimed the following:
>
>(* *) for comments was actually pretty commonly used - maybe because it
>stands out more than { }. I don't know if I've ever seen (. .) instead
>of [ ].
>
Or some terminals provided [ ] but not { } <G>
Modula-2 appears to have fixed on (* *) for comments, and only [ ] for
indexing.
Consider the potential mayhem going from a language where { } are
comment delimiters to one where they are block delimiters <G>
>C also has alternative rerpresentations for characters not in the common
>subset of ISO-646 and EBCDIC. However, the trigraphs are extremely ugly
>(e.g ??< ??> instead of { }). I have seen them used (on an IBM/390
>system with an EBCDIC variant without curly braces) and it's really no
>fun to read that.
>
My college mainframe used EBCDIC, but the available languages did not
include C or Pascal. We had APL, FORTRAN-IV (in full separate compilation
form, and FLAG [FORTRAN Load and Go] which was a "all in one file, compile
& run" used by first year students), COBOL (74?), BASIC, SNOBOL,
Meta-Symbol and AP (both assemblers, though Meta-Symbol could, provided the
proper definition file, generate absolute binary code for pretty much any
processor), and something called SL-1 (Simulation Language-1, which
produced FORTRAN output for discrete event models).
UCSD Pascal, and PDP-11 assembly were run on a pair of LSI-11 systems.
Assembly used for the operating system principles course.
I didn't encounter "real" C until getting a TRS-80 (first as integer
LC, then Pro-MC), along with Supersoft LISP (on cassette tape!). (I had
books for C and Ada before encountering compilers for them)
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