4 Apr
2024
4 Apr
'24
2:44 a.m.
On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 1:30 PM segaloco via COFF <coff(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
I get (friendly) flack for this from some of my
coworkers, context is
we're a C# and Java(Type)Script shop. They poke fun at how I write these
languages like a C programmer but I don't ever hear anyone complaining
about the readability of my code :)
Someone once observed that a good Fortran programmer can write Fortran in
any
programming language.
Here's another PL/I toxic language feature. Both COBOL and Fortran were
designed around the same time that Noam Conmsky was working out formal
language theory and both have ill-behaved grammars. Fortran has
context-dependent lexical analysis, for example. PL/I is better
behaved--the grammar for its lexical analysis is a regular grammar and can
be processed with a state machine. But unlike C and other more modern
languages, PL/I has no reserved keywords. So you can write things such as:
IF IF=THEN THEN THEN = ELSE;
Here the first IF and the second THEN are keywords. Everything else is a
variable name. Our PL/I shops forbade variable names that were the same as
language keywords.
I suppose the designers of the PL/I language wanted to allow for the
introduction of new language keywords while retaining backwards
compatibility with programs that may have used the new keyword sa a
variable name.
-Paul W.