Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

John Levine wrote:

According to Stephen Fuld <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid>:

That may have been the idea, but I think the idea was wrong.

 
I think few would disagree with both parts of that.  I certainly
wouldn't.  But I give the designers some slack as, in the late
1950s, there was lettle knowledge about programming languages to go
on.  Now, the mistake is obvious.

 
COBOL is older than Fortran, and back in the day there were plenty of
people who were outraged at I=I+1 which is mathematically absurd for
the physicicts and mathematicians who were Fortran's early users. 
 
Algol gave us various kinds of := which were supposed to be better.
 

Yes, the COMPUTE statement.  i.e. COMPUTE I = I + 1

 
You could do that, but I think this is at least as clear:
 
     ADD 1 TO PRODUCT-INDEX.

Note that my statement on the COMPUTE statement was in direct answer to
Anton's question.  I have no problem with your statement, but note that
things get messy quickly when doing more complex stuff.  For example,
the non-COMPUTE syntax for something like

E = (A*B) + (C*D)

requires three separate statements, and, if you need to keep the
original values of A through D, you must define two additional
variables for the intermediate results.

Don't forget that while COBOL's control structures were quite weak,
its data structures still look pretty good.

Absolutely!  The power of a MOVE CORRESPONDING with properly defined
data structures was a joy to behold.





--
 - Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)