OT: Punctuation-starved Programming Languages

[Bob Brown]

COBOL does rely on the period.

-Bob

>It was thus said that the Great Don Y once stated:
>>  Yeah, this is OT -- *except* in my hope that perhaps some
>>  *vintage* language might fit the bill...
>>
>>  So, the question:  are (were) there any useful languages
>>  designed that did not rely heavily on punctuation in their
>>  syntax?  It almost seems an inconsistency -- older languages
>>  tended to be skimpy in their syntax (e.g., short identifiers,
>>  global scope, etc.) which would suggest that punctuation
>>  exploits would be MORE valuable to them.
>
>   I wouldn't say that short identifiers, global scope, etc. are restrictions
>on syntax per se, but as a limitation due to the capacities of the computers
>at the time (like the 6 character limit of identifiers in C [1]).  But that
>aside, I can only think of a few that did not rely upon punctuation that
>much.  COBOL is one (although I don't know it well enough to say).  Pilot
>maybe.  BASIC is another one that can get by with minimal punctuation
>(parenthesis and brackets notwithstanding).  And it would be fairly trivial
>to remove punctuation from Forth with the proper word definitions.
>
>   Then there's always assembly ...
>
>   -spc (Do you have some special interest in this?)
>
>[1]	ANSI C89 limited external identifiers to the first six characters
>	due to limitations on certain system linkers.  An ANSI C89 compiler
>	could allow more characters, but it had to support at least six.


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