Clive Page <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
...
>I thought that the reason brackets [] and braces {} were not part of the
>Fortran character set was out of consideration for users of non-English
>keyboards, where these keys tend to be replaced by letters with accents.
>On the other hand continental users of C and other languages where
>brackets/braces are unavoidable seem to manage, so maybe this is no longer
>an issue? Any comments from the continent?
With the advent of the internet, this may be changing (perhaps slowly
though). The international standards on web protocols are based on
the international reference version of ISO 646 - that is, American ASCII.
The additional characters allowed by the national variations of ISO 646
are now preferred to be replaced with the appropriate characters from
Latin-1, et. al.. In fact, as I understand it, the future direction seems to
be the adoption of ISO 10646 (Unicode), either whole or in part.
>My own feeling is that if [] were to be allowed in Fortran, the best use
>for them would be around array subscripts, making it much easier to
>distinguish array references from function calls.
Actually, I prefer subscripts and functions to have the same syntax.
That way (though it's rare) you can replace a function on integers
with a predefined array, or vice-versa, without recoding the rest of
your program. This isn't a strongly felt bias, but I do prefer it..
--
J. Giles
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