This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 110 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 110 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 John Cowan writes: > If newline as a statement terminator counts as syntactically significant > whitespace, then there are a lot bigger guns than Icon that have it, > starting with Fortran, Cobol, and Basic, and going on to every command > language ever created. I'd put them in a slightly different class. They were created in the era of punched cards (FORTRAN, COBOL) or line editors (BASIC) and so treat the line as a natural unit. Through much of that era, there was no such thing as a newline character; I can recall writing FORTRAN programs in which each output line began with a format signal, directing the printer to stay on the same line, advance one line, advance two lines, or skip to the top of the next page. > To bracket such languages with identation > sensitive ones is to trivialize the concept. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all if Wheeler hadn't used Icon as an example in support of his argument. > If you're worried about it, make sure all continued lines end in _, > that's all. Sigh. Yes, of course -- a marker character. And in FORTRAN you can always put a C or an asterisk in column 6 of the next line. These are evidences of _failure to achieve homoiconicity_. They are design kludges, used to paper over the incompatibility between whitespace used for layout and whitespace used to signal syntactic structure. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.9 <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/> iEYEARECAAYFAlGimiEACgkQbBGsCPR0ElRxGACg0rHmLUT2eKdJnNIC8v7WpAK+ KTsAoNM5b5RLCzsp7RzoOoNP6DfWhfSf =kR/G -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----