Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

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.

Don't forget that while COBOL's control structures were quite weak,
its data structures still look pretty good.  Everything in a C or C++
structure comes from COBOL by way of PL/I.