Re: Why no numbers allowed in variables?

[David Kastrup]

J Martin Rushton <address@hidden> writes:

> This discussion is strangely familiar.  As one who learnt on FORTRAN IV
> many years ago, I'm used to seeing that:
>
> READ INPUT TAPE 5, 501, IA, IB, IC
> and
> READINPUTTAPE5,501,IA,IB,IC
> or even
> RE ADIN PUTTA PE5,5 01,I A,I B,I C
>
> are the same.  I'm sure there were those back in the late '50s arguing
> over the use of spaces and numbers within variables.
>
> (OT) I've even seen code which intentionally mangled FORTRAN source to
> make it unreadable, like the third example above.

That's more like making spaces not have any lexical meaning, ever.
Basically, if it cannot be part of an identifier, it also cannot
separate them.  Also you have to be aware that a fresh punch card is
both empty and contains 80 spaces.  Basically spaces are not even
recognizable characters in the original typical Fortran input medium.

For TeX it was more the decision to be able to write things like

\count5=7

and LilyPond input is very very loosely modeled after that (via MusicTeX
and MPP).

-- 
David Kastrup