Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!taumet!steve
From: steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Comparison operators (was: He's not the only one at it again!)
Message-ID: <363@taumet.com>
Date: 31 Jul 90 15:43:03 GMT
References: <25681@cs.yale.edu> <9007301417.AA21099@thep.lu.se>
Organization: Taumetric Corporation, San Diego
Lines: 28

magnus@THEP.LU.SE (Magnus Olsson) writes:

>If you want to see a *really* ugly solution, have a look at Fortran,
>where the comparison operators are written .EQ., .GT. and so on.

>BTW, does anyone know the reason for this? In Algol and C, you *must*
>have different operators ...

By "this", I assume you mean the FORTRAN operators .EQ. etc.  We must
remember the kinds of I/O equipment in use when FORTRAN was developed
in the mid-1950's.  There was no ASCII character set, and manufacturers
used their own (incompatible) character sets and encodings.  There
were usually none of the characters < > : ; ' " nor others that we are
now accustomed to.  Beyond this, the FORTRAN rule was that spaces did
not matter, and could be inserted or deleted anywhere without changing
the program except in Hollerith fields (literal character strings).
You could not write
	IF (A < B) ...
but
	IF (A LT B) ...
had to mean the same as
	IF(ALTB) ...
This was made unambiguous by using dots in the operators which looked
like identifiers (.EQ. .GT. .AND. .OR. etc).
	IF(A.LT.B) ...
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com