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From: news@ism780c.isc.com (News system)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Comparison operators (was: He's not the only one at it again!)
Message-ID: <45932@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 31 Jul 90 22:14:35 GMT
References: <25681@cs.yale.edu> <9007301417.AA21099@thep.lu.se>
Reply-To: marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 32

In article <9007301417.AA21099@thep.lu.se> 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?

FORTRAN (actually FORTRAN/II, FORTRAN did not have .EQ.) was designed when
input devices (key punches) and printers had only 48 characters in the
character set.  The characters were:

     26 capital letters
     10 decimal digits
	space
     11 special characters  + - / * ( ) . , $ = @  (scientific set)
or for some printers
     11 special characters  & - / * % ^ . , $ # @  (commercial set)

The ^ shown above was not the actual commercial graphic.  The graphic was
a pillow shaped character.  Also my memory is slightly fuzzy about the @ in
scientific set.  I may have been something else.  But in any event the
characters < and > were not available.

If you were unlucky and had a printer with the commercial character set, a
FORTRAN statement like:

      Y(I)=X(J)+10.0

Would print as:

      Y%I^#X%J^&10.0   (where the ^ is really the pillow)

And since no one used spaces, the programs were almost imposible to read.