Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!dkuug!rcbal!oz!kc
From: kc@oz.rci.dk (Knud Christensen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Algol was an advance, was He's not the only one at it again!
Message-ID: <1109@oz.rci.dk>
Date: 2 Aug 90 05:41:03 GMT
References: <1288@s8.Morgan.COM> <58372@lanl.gov> <1990Jul30.174035.26412@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> <3262@stl.stc.co.uk> <1990Jul31.185100.2865@sctc.com>
Organization: RC International, Copenhagen, Denmark
Lines: 35

boebert@sctc.com (Earl Boebert) writes:

>tom@stl.stc.co.uk (Tom Thomson) writes:

>>In article <1990Jul30.174035.26412@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes:
>>>(Of course, just because Algol has a context-free easy-to-tokenize syntax
>>>doesn't mean that actual implementations all do.  There was IBM's Algol F,
>>>which ignored blanks and required you to put quotes around your keywords,
>>>proving once again that Real programmers can write Fortran programs in any
>>>language.

>>What's been forgotten here is that ALL the early implementations of Algol
>>had this problem, it's NOT an IBM Algol F problem.
>>
> 
>[Stuff deleted ...]

>>Tom Thomson   [tom @ nw.stl.stc.co.uk

>I don't recall GEIR Algol as having special delimeters for reserved words;
>will check my old class notes from Naur's course to be sure and report
>later ...

>Earl


GIER Algol used underscored keywords to distinguish them from identifiers.
This was possible because the GIER computer used the flexowriter character
set (the underscore character was non spacing).


Knud Christensen
kc@oz.rci.dk

Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out. - Hoare -