[net.lang] Discussion on removing punctuation

d25001@mic.UUCP (10/12/86)

>    Punctuation or seperators (; , .) have long been a part of programming
>language design. Anyone who has programmed for even the shortest amount of
>will realize that these little demons are responsible for a large amount of
>possible errors, thus the question is why have them at all?
>
  [ Example of proposed punctuationless language omitted. ]
>
>Admittedly, this looks an awful lot like swapping ; for end, and that is
>probably so. But aren't end's alot more intuitive then ; ? Maybe not, maybe
>so. Which is better? That's up to you.. What do you think?
>
>                                      dave brosius
>                                      dmb at psuvma.bitnet

  Hoary old FORTRAN used the newline character instead of ";" or "END".
One could make a case that this was more intuitive than either.
There is certainly no reason to suppose that our choices are limited to
just these three possibilities.

Carrington Dixon
UUCP: { convex, infoswx, texsun!rrm }!mcomp!mic!d25001