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From: gaynor@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Silver)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: re: re: compound statements
Message-ID: <5287@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Sat, 5-Jul-86 21:41:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.5287
Posted: Sat Jul  5 21:41:22 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Jul-86 04:31:28 EDT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 42


[oh give me a home, where the line-eaters rome, and the...]

ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) writes...

> [...!topaz!gaynor writes]
>
> > In many languages, the body of a program or subprogram consists of a
> > compound statement.  This seems like an arbitrary restriction, and is
> > quite annoying at times.  Often the action of a program or subprogam
> > is expressable as a single statement, and I would never otherwise
> > enclose a single statement within a compound statement.
> 
> What languages?
> 
> The only one that comes to mind is C.  I suspect that it makes parsing
> much easier in C.

Oh, a couple of languages come to mind.  Particularly Algol (?) and
its descendants, C, Pascal, and Ada (to name a few biggies).  There
are plenty of others.  10 pts to the one who can name the most.

!!Simpler parsing methods is *NO*EXCUSE* for compromising a language!!
May you someday be forced to program in microcode (knock on wood :-).
I'm sure many compiler schemes would surely handle the removal of this
restriction no problem.  Especially those that are generated by a
compiler generator.  I myself modified my Compilers-1 project (a
simple recursive-descent compiler for a subset of Pascal) to do
(sub)program bodies this way in about four minutes.  One good thing
about this modification is that all existing code still works.

                         _   /|
                         \`o_O'
                           ( )   Aachk! Phft!   
                            U

Disclaimer: The opinions and/or information and/or code expressed
            here were generated by this characature (stolen from
            Dave Rasmussen, to which I have taken the liberty of
            adding ears).  So don't look to me for a disclaimer!

Silver  {...!topaz!gaynor}