Jörg Stiller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
...
>(2) to most people it is clear that the introduction of ^ for
> exponentiation would improve the readability of Fortran,
> whithout adding new functionality, nor new problems
Actually, that's exactly not the point I've been making. If you
were designing a programming language for the very first time,
and had no historical "backward compatibility" to deal with,
_and_ if you allowed yourself the luxury of assuming that
you had the full US ASCII character set (maybe as part of
ISO 8859-<n>) then ^ would be the only really natural
choice for exponentiation. Without the prior example of
Fortran, ** would probably never even occur to you.
However, Fortran has a history. It is often used by people
who used a different language before (where ^ had a different,
often badly chosen meaning). It is sometimes used with editors
that display the characters in a confusing font (making reasonable
choices look bad). Changing the Fortran rule now would be
more confusing (at least to existing users) than leaving it alone.
The ^ character on its own merits is more mnemonic. But that,
by itself, is not a sufficient reason to change.
>Cheers, J\"org
>
>PS: Do you see the "ö"?
I see the ö in your PS, in your signature it shows as \ followed
by " followed by o.
--
J. Giles
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