Re: ada paper critic

[Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> 
> By the way, is it true that Algol 60 and/or Algol 68 was font-sensitive
> (i.e. "reserved words" are distinguished by being in boldface)?

I've never used A68, but I knew someone who used it in the early 1980s
who explained that keywords were somehow distinguishable from other
identifiers. In text this difference was boldface, so calling the
difference "font" seems as good as any. In practice, the compiler
required the keywords to be marked somehow to indicate that they were in
the keyword representation. I don't recall the actual details of how
they were marked. Sorry.

Other things I recall:

The programmer could declare new infix operators. This seemed like a lot
of work for the programmer, and no doubt for the compiler writer.

What Ada calls "type" A68 called "mode". I'm not sure what that was
supposed to mean. "Type" seems better, though still not great, since
usually declaring a type in Ada requires more than just the type
declaration.

These are remarks by an ignorant non-A68 user, so weigh them
appropriately.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I unclog my nose towards you."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail