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?