Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!borg!hatteras!denelsbe
From: denelsbe@hatteras.cs.unc.edu (Kevin Denelsbeck)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: improve language by dropping ;
Message-ID: <1840@borg.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 23 Feb 91 21:47:49 GMT
References: <8507.27b91f9e@jetson.uh.edu> <329@smds.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.unc.edu
Organization: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 33

This is just a quick plug for Turing, a language recently developed at the
University of Toronto.  Turing's grammar was designed so that no statement
separators (other than whitespace) are needed.  So you can write stuff like

	x := x + y +
	z * sin(
	phi
	) / pi

or somesuch, if you wanted, as well as squeeze all sorts of statements on
one line, such as

	x:=x+y y:=x-y x:=x-y put x,y

which swaps x and y and displays their values (working properly if x and y
aren't aliased to the same var).  Indenting is left up to the programmer.
Turing handles its control structures by requiring them to follow the
form

	<command>
	   ...
	   {code}
	   ...
	end <command>

so we have "if ... end if", "loop ... end loop", and so on.  This gives a
great deal of flexibility to the programmer to format things the way he/she
wants.  A possible drawback, especially with large programs, is that syntax
checking may take longer if the compiler thinks an expression is continuing
over several lines when in fact the programmer forgot something silly like
a right parenthesis.

Kev @ UNC