OT: Punctuation-starved Programming Languages

[Christian Corti]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Don Y wrote:
> the capabilities of machines available at those times.  Though
> I suspect some was just the author(s) taking poetic liberties
> (e.g., Algol's ::= )

Algol's syntax constists of symbols like '<-' ';' and so on. If you read 
e.g. the book from the Alcor group you will see that they tell you, in 
case that there are no '<-' etc. you may use more primitive symbols to 
represent them, e.g.
  ':=' = '<-'
  '.,' = ';'
  '..' = ':'
  '.(' = '['
  '.)' = ']'
and so on.

Now think if you want to write '<-' and don't even have a ':' ... Right, 
you have to write '..='

In Pascal, e.g., you can write '(*' and '*)' instead of '{' and '}' if you 
don't have curly brackets.

Christian