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( 2.31.New operators: 'eq', 'ne', 'last', '..' ) ?

Dennis Lee Bieber wlfraed at ix.netcom.com
Mon Jan 24 23:22:10 EST 2000 
On Tue, 25 Jan 2000 02:09:24 +0100, Stefan Schwarzer
<s.schwarzer at ndh.net> declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:

> Hello Dennis,
> 
> Dennis Lee Bieber schrieb:
> >         The only languages I've ever seen that use a text string for
> > those operators are FORTRAN and VMS DCL.
> 
> The only programming languages I (personally) know to pay attention
> to amount of whitespace are Fortran, Assembler and Python ;-) .
>
	So far as I know standard Fortran 77 is still white space
indifferent -- ignoring the old card punch parts: columns 1-5 for
statement labels, and column 6 for continuation, and the last 8 (of 80)
for sequence/comment. Most compilers these days will accept a single tab
as getting you past the continuation column, and the VMS compiler will
interpret "<tab><digit>" to mean "continuation". (As far as my coding
style -- start everything with a <tab> except labels and continuations,
in which I still use column 6 for continuation){disclaimer: Fortran 90
now if fully free format, using "&" at the end of the continued line,
rather than a marker on the continuation line}

	Within a statement line, however, spaces only matter in string
constants.

	i f ( 1 00    .0 .   l      t.   a bs (x    y     z ) ) t he n

is the same as

	if (100.0 .lt. abs(xyz)) then

	Fortran is not an easy language to parse -- it has to reach the
decimal point or comma to determine which of the following is an
assignment and which is a do-loop:

	do	10	i	=	1 	. 	35
	do	10	i	= 	1	,	35

(at which point it has to back track to either reference a floating
point variable "do10i" or a loop index "i" with statement label "10").

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