Re: New symbolic/numeric/dynamic/intuitive programming language

In article <rem-2008feb21-004@xxxxxxxxx>,
rem642b@xxxxxxxxx (Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:

From: "Mark Nudelman" <ma...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
This seems like an instance of the COBOL school of language
design, the philosophy being that the closer a program looks to
ordinary English, the better it is.

COBOL actually had at least one good idea: PICture clauses.
In COBOL's formative years, 80-column Hollerith cards, with all
data laid out in fixed columns, were the standard for input and output.
Even printed reports used fixed format.
When a data layout was specified once, it could be used both to
parse incoming data and to generate outgoing data in the same
format. The modern equivalent for variable-length fields with
nested structure would be BNF. (The more popular regular
expressions, aren't powerful enough, IMO.) I haven't seen any
programming language that directly used BNF for its standard way to
specify input/output parsing/formatting, which I see as a
deficiency in *all* programming languages to date.

Are you saying that lex and yacc fail this test?

--
Michael Press
.

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