Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!bloom-beacon!apple!well!pokey From: pokey@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Algol-style semicolons Message-ID: <10084@well.UUCP> Date: 22 Dec 88 08:46:05 GMT References: <2185@eos.UUCP> Reply-To: Jef Poskanzer Organization: Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric, Ada Lovelace Cabal Lines: 28 In the referenced message, eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) grossly generalizes: >Modula-2 is appears closer to Mesa than Modula[-1]. But not close enough! Modula-3 appears much closer. Doesn't matter, though; since it doesn't look like C, it won't catch on. Perhaps someday someone will graft Mesa's functionality onto C's syntax. We can call the result C Plus Mesa, or CP/M for short... >On ":=" versus "=": Altos had an backward arrow assignment key, not "<-" for >Mesa. (this could correspond to other language arrows (UP) ^ and (RIGHT) >"->".) Just standardize some extra characters. 8-) It will never happen. Old-timers will recall that on old teletypes, '_' was a back-arrow and '^' was an up-arrow. The switch was made around 1971, and for a while some people wanted to look for old-style print heads for the new ttys we were getting. But eventually we decided it was wiser to stick with the standard. Xerox went the other way, and kept arrow glyphs for those characters in (most of) their fonts. That was not too bad, but around 1984 they decided to diverge even further from ASCII, and defined a bunch of characters in the range 128-255. They added arrows in all four directions, '<<' and '>>' (French quotation characters, used in Mesa as comment delimiters), and some other chud. It made mail gatewaying rather, um, interesting. --- Jef Jef Poskanzer jef@rtsg.ee.lbl.gov ...well!pokey "C combines the power of assembly language ... with the flexibility of assembly language."