Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

MitchAlsup1 wrote:

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.

 

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.

 
 
Picture data structures ??

I'm not sure what you are saying here.  While Picture clauses are not
in C nor C++, John never cleamed they were.  His clain was that those
features that were included came from COBOL.  e.g. nested structs,
array of structs, structs of arrays, etc.

And I miss some equivalent of picture clauses in C every time I see,
including in this NG, a number consisting of a string of say 8 or 9 or
more digits without the every three digit separator character, which
sure makes reading such numbers easier.  :-(





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