Re: Silliness (was: Looking for good Ada95 book)

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

adam@irvine.com (Adam Beneschan) writes:

>Gee, this thread is making me feel old.  Old, because I used to work
>as a COBOL programmer, back when our programs had to be put in on
>punch cards, which couldn't handle lower case at all.  So from having
>to work for three years with listings that were constantly shouting at
>me, I should have gone deaf years ago.

Actually, this is wrong.  Punched cards can handle lower case just fine.
Maybe your card _punch_ couldn't, but the punched _cards_ could, and so
could the reader.  I still have a couple of old S/370s quickrefs somewhere
(a yellow one and a green one) and they list card codes for all the EBCDIC
characters.  That's for 80-column cards; the 96-coumn cards used ASCII.
The problem was most likely your printer.  When I was an undergraduate I
used a B6700, which used EBCDIC, so it was quite straightforward to enter
lower case, but our line printers couldn't _print it_.

A convention that is appropriate when you have only one case is not
appropriate when you have more than one case.  I look at some of my
old listings, and wonder "how did I ever cope with this stuff"?


>    ADD A TO B GIVING C, DAMMIT!!!!!!!!!

>the compiler would never accept this, always sending us back error
>messages like "Don't raise your voice with me or I'm going to reject
>your whole program".

For COBOL, this is a joke.  For Intercal, the occasional "PLEASE" modifier
_is_ demanded by the compiler, and it _will_ reject your program without
them!

>On the other hand, Ada programmers tend to end all their statements
>with semicolons, which means they aren't really statements at all,

No, it just means they are _clauses_, not _sentences_.

Burroughs "NDL" (Network Definition Language) was a special purpose
language for programming the attached Datacom Processor.  Broadly
speaking, the syntax was _very_ close to Algol 60, except that statements
ended with full stops.  Theoretically, an entire source file in a language
like Ada or C or Pascal is a single "sentence" in the grammar; I suppose
we should prefer Pascal because Pascal sentences _do_ end with a full stop!

 (:-) (:-) (:-) (:-) (:-)

-- 
Mixed Member Proportional---a *great* way to vote!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.