On Apr 10, 2012, at 3:16 AM, Erik Corry wrote: > 2012/4/10 Andreas Rossberg <[email protected]>: >> ... >> >> No need to burden the language with multiple representations. Algol 68 tried >> and failed :). > > I think Unicode support has come a long way since then. >
PL/I tried it and succeeded. It its early days (only a couple years before Algol 68) it had to exist in a world where 026 card punches still existed. 026's didn't support many useful characters such as >, < , [, ], etc. So PL/I had digraphs for use on legacy input devices and pretty-glyphs for use with "modern" input devices. Over-time the digraphs faded from use. Something similar happened with FORTRAN. Prior to FORTRAN 90 you had to say .LT. instead of < but now it supports a full suite of Ascii operators in addition to the original 026-based character sequences. Allen _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
