Timeline for What is the story behind 'goto' vs 'go' 'to' in ALGOL-60?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 2, 2024 at 17:00 | history | edited | Leo B. | CC BY-SA 4.0 | added 753 characters in body |
| May 10, 2021 at 22:30 | comment | added | supercat | @WayneConrad: Back in the days when things were written as allcaps without spaces, I disliked the text-based relational operators in FORTRAN (e.g. instead of writing I < 5 one would write I.EQ.5) but I think that with suitable use of spaces, having text-based operators would have allowed many language-design problems to be avoided, e.g. by following Pascal's lead of using separate operators for integer-result division versus floating-point division, and--going beyond that--having separate operators for "remainder" and "mod residue". | |
| May 8, 2021 at 22:43 | comment | added | Wayne Conrad | @alephzero I'm not a fan of stropping either, but it seems to me it makes a language easier by extend without breaking existing code. You could add new keywords all day long and be certain that you won't clash with any identifiers anywhere. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 17:31 | vote | accept | Leo B. | ||
| May 8, 2021 at 16:47 | answer | added | dave | timeline score: 13 | |
| May 8, 2021 at 16:03 | history | became hot network question | |||
| May 8, 2021 at 15:28 | answer | added | dave | timeline score: 3 | |
| May 8, 2021 at 14:12 | comment | added | dave | Re: my tests with Whetstone Algol. I just read the actual manual, and it claims that go to as separate words (in underlined form) is acceptable to the compiler.. I think therefore I was seeing some artifact of what I assume to be a modern front-end conversion (since the compiler does not understand ASCII). | |
| May 8, 2021 at 13:43 | comment | added | dave | I'm curious: how does PL/i distinguish between if if and if if, which are both plausible sequences in Algol 60? Sad old C of course has to invent the ?: operator for the first case, not to mention it's another parentheses-everywhere language. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 13:35 | comment | added | dave | "Other languages" are heavily dependent on other deilmiters. I would characterize PL/I as having an untreatable parenthesis dependency. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 13:33 | comment | added | dave | @alephzero - it's a matter of taste. I prefer having language symbols visually distinct. And so do others: note the number of pretty-printers for other languages that represent reserved words in boldface even though their language lacks the concept. As regards being divorced from the real world: the Flexo was a common tape-prep device in the real world at the time so underlinign was natural (and as far as I recall, underlining was the reference representation, boldface was a publication variant). | |
| May 8, 2021 at 13:26 | comment | added | dave | (Revised due to incorrect reporting). I tested this against KDF9 Whetstone Algol using an online facility. In both apostrophe-stropped and underlined representations, no space was permitted. Thus 'goto' and _g_o_t_o are ok, but 'go to' and _g_o _t_o are not. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 13:23 | comment | added | alephzero | I never understood the logic of using stropping at all. It seems like a deliberate policy of divorcing "the standard" from any real-world "implementation". But then the original standard also ignored other real-world requirements like I/O,. so maybe it was intended mainly as an academic exercise in language design. Other languages (e.g. PL/I, and all versions of Fortran up to the present) have no reserved words and don't require it. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 13:04 | comment | added | dave | On Flexowriters, underscore did not move the carriage, so _b_e_g_i_n was how you typed begin, and FWIW, that was a single 8-bit symbol in the KDF9 filestore. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 11:39 | answer | added | Raffzahn | timeline score: 5 | |
| May 8, 2021 at 9:34 | comment | added | user3840170 | Hmm, if you can’t capture the output before it’s converted, you might mitigate this by buffering words and treating unambiguous-script characters as mode switches for ambiguous ones in the current word. This will fail for wholly-ambiguous words (HET / НЕТ), but then, so will anything else. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 9:28 | history | edited | user3840170 | CC BY-SA 4.0 | cyrillic letters, spell out dates |
| May 8, 2021 at 8:00 | comment | added | Leo B. | @user3840170 There were two commonly used encodings: one, GOST 10859, had Cyrillics plus DFGIJLNQRSUVWZ. In the emulator, I have to make a decision how to map ABCEHKMOPTXY - to Latin or Cyrillic. I've decided to favor Latin, so that the listings would be fully Latin if only Latin letters were used, and easily copy-pasted. This makes Russian error messages appear mixed-script, but that's much less of an inconvenience. The other encoding was ASCII/ISO based, but it was internal; the printers operated in the GOST encoding. | |
| May 8, 2021 at 6:22 | comment | added | user3840170 | As an aside, why did you mix Cyrillic and Latin letters in your transcript? Did you just pick the Cyrillic characters manually from a character map, or is this a reflection of how the characters are actually encoded on that system? | |
| May 8, 2021 at 6:03 | history | asked | Leo B. | CC BY-SA 4.0 |