Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages

On Sun, 29 Sep 2024 07:16:43 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 29/09/2024 04:15, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:17:12 -0700, Lars Poulsen wrote:
 

I was late to discovering C. In the 1970's I lived in Denmark, and our
terminals, printers, keyboards etc were using a national version of
the ISO standard interchange code that Americans kn ow as ASCII.
Since Danish have three unique (well sort-of shared with Swedish and
Norvegian) vowels at the end of the alphabet (æ ø å / Æ Ø Å), these
were allocated at the end of the alphabet - after z / Z. When you look
at the ASCII character table, you will see that each of these
conflicts with significant symbols of the C language ({ \ } / [ | ]).
This created a strong disincentive to experiment with a "fringe"
programming language.

 
Don't feel bad. I always forget what the Apple II lacked, maybe the
tilde,
but even with a Z-80 SoftCard you had to do some tweaks to write C
code.

 
Curly braces. I had a friend who said 'you cant program in C on an Apple
because there are no curly braces'.
 
I think I sent him a header file with
 
#define BEGIN {
#define END }

Thanks. That make more sense that a missing tilde. It's a useful operator
but not something you use every day.

 
In it.