NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.
All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
every Perl script that says:
"Don't be stupid."
--Larry Wall
Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.
Fortran had Facist whitespace first (Score:1)
Google finds us a reference [umd.edu] from which I can reconstruct the following, which I could almost have recited from slowly fading memory:
There was a Fortran IV pre-processor called FLEX that could not only pretty-print your code with ascii arrows but would parse the pretty-printed form if you edited it. (It was a competitor to Bell's RATFOR and a precursor of the new-fangled Fortran 77, not to be confused with Flex 2, which was more pascalene deviant fortran, and the Gnu Flex which is rather different altogether.) The parselmouths or herpetologists may not count it as a precursor influence, but it was the first Fortran to extend mandatory whitespace into the statement area!
Yes, I said "card" and referred to a standard promulgated in 1977 as new-fangled; these tools may have been obsolescent before you were born, if you don't remember the Great Renaming.
Bill
# I had a sig when sigs were cool
use Sig;
Reply to This