Re: [TUHS] RIP John Backus

I had an interesting run-in with FORTRAN's blank treatment very early in my career.   A couple of weeks after I graduated from college I had a summer job at Bell Labs.  I was given a job to program a state minimization algorithm -- they expected it to take me the whole summer.  A couple of days after arriving, i heard about a new language, SNOBOL, developed at another location at Bell Labs.  This sounded like the perfect language to write my program in, so I got a copy to use (I think I was the first user at Murray Hill). Now, in those days, there were rooms full of "keypunch girls" (sic) whose job was to punch up our programs (written on coding sheets) and verify them and give us the deck back.  The vast majority of jobs they encountered were FORTRAN, and to avoid ambiguity they simply skipped all blanks.   (it wasn't quite that easy -- they knew about column 7 and hollerith strings).  But any blanks that we wanted on the cards had to be explicitly indicated on the coding sheet. Of course, SNOBOL had what we would consider now a more modern syntax with blanks significant and nothing magic about columns 6 or 7...    So when I gave them my first 2-page SNOBOL program, they typed everything on each line starting in column 7 and with all blanks removed.    For some reason, the first couple of cards looked OK to me, so I submitted the deck, and proceeded to get a thick printout that I think enumerated every error message the compiler could produce. I started indicating my blanks carefully but their habit persisted, and almost any nontrivial job  I gave them had errors, either because I hadn't inidicated a blank or they hadn't typed it when I indicated it. Since I had been punching cards myself for a couple of years at college, and when working 2nd shift (when turnaround was much better) there were no keypunchers available, after a couple of weeks I got them to agree to let me keypunch my own programs.  A few years later, the keypunchers were gone, having been rendered obsolete by time sharing and online editing... Oh, and I got the job done in 3 weeks once I got SNOBOL to work...   It really was the right language for the job... Steve PS:  For years afterwards, when I punched in FORTRAN programs I left out all the blanks.  It wasn't until  I worked on a large program with several other people that I was forced to change this habit, my coworkers having threatened me with death or dismemberment if I didn't...