In a message dated 2/16/2000 2:09:53 AM Pacific Standard Time,
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> 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.
Some of us remember the keypunch machines and even the ASR teletypes which
didn't have enough characters to afford more than one kind of bracket.
Fortran worked then, so I supposed that the traditionalists said "What was
good enough in the past will be good enough in the future."
>
> 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.
I had to explain the generation of a function call by a typo to a fellow team
member just this week.
Tim
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