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From: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Discussion on removing punctuation in programming languages
Message-ID: <536@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 26-Oct-86 18:26:51 EST
Article-I.D.: mcgill-v.536
Posted: Sun Oct 26 18:26:51 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Oct-86 22:44:27 EST
References: <695@dragon.fluke.UUCP> <21590@rochester.ARPA>
Organization: McGill University, Montreal
Lines: 33

In article <21590@rochester.ARPA>, ken@rochester.ARPA (Comfy chair) writes:
> One thing that is easily forgotten is that when humans look at a
> program listing we see indentation and spacing and all that.
> Unfortunately the compiler only sees a single stream.

*Current* compilers see only a stream of tokens.  Compilers could be
and probably have been written which used/use the identation to intuit
intended nesting, assisting in such things as error recovery.

> If you think that "any decent compiler should be able to error
> recovery
[sic]
> in the absence of delimiters", try reading your program on ticker
> tape.  And no backtracking, either.

Why no backtracking?  A compiler usually has access to enough virtual
memory to hold the entire source file available for random access.
Even when this is impossible, the compiler can normally seek around in
the file, which gives the same capability with a performance penalty.
I am ignoring smaller machines (eg, PCs) here; but I think you would
find that a backtracking compiler doesn't look at very much when it
backtracks - just things like "what was the indentation at the
beginning of this loop?" - and hence doesn't need to remember anything
like the entire source file.

					der Mouse

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