Re: 6502 illegal opcodes questions

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Linards Ticmanis wrote:
> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
> > Actually, I believe that _pragma_ was borrowed from Algol 68,
> > which must be the most influential least implemented language.  ;-)
>
>
> As they say, Algol was a great improvement on its successors. ;-)

Algol 60 introduced many great ideas, like block structure and
BNF syntax description.

Algol 68, with its meta-syntactic definition, served to clarify
a number of issues in language design, but ultimately confused
its non-theorist "market".  I really liked the palindromic block
delimiters though ("do"-"od", "if"-"fi", etc.), and I used them
for a system implementation language ("proc"-"corp", "case"-"esac",
"struc"-"curts", etc.).

Many years later, I think that the "offside rule" for delimiting
blocks simply by indentation is a very nice approach.  Why on
earth should white space, the most significant characteristic of
text to the human eye, be ignored by most programming languages?

So the following would be properly "bracketed" by the offside
rule:

if condition1
   or condition2
then foo
     blah
     blah
else bar
     blah
nextstatement
...


-michael

Parallel computing for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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