From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,808505c9db7d5613 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Subject: Re: Silliness (was: Looking for good Ada95 book) Date: 1996/11/06 Message-ID: <55p9dp$n0p$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 194799668 references: <55955a$n04@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <327E3E4D.5107@watson.ibm.com> <55mcmd$63c@krusty.irvine.com> organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia nntp-posting-user: ok newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-11-06T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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.