I am generally a lurker, but I do have a strong opinion on this issue.
Namely, it is a real pain to have to type "<Shift>%" all over the place
when one has sore hands. I too have difficulty reading the different
components, especially if the code is in upper case.
>Ms. Beverly K. Pope
>ChevronTexaco Energy Technology Co.
>P.O. Box 425, Room E560
>Bellaire, TX 77401-0425
>e-mail: [log in to unmask]
>office: (713) 432-3921
>fax: (713) 432-6620
-----Original Message-----
From: Fortran 90 List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of J.L.Schonfelder
Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2004 8:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Symbols
--On 02 March 2004 14:32 +0000 John Reid <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> I can't help but think the % symbol was used in Fortran just to be
>> different to C. I sure hope there was a better reason than that,
>> because now we all have to live with it.
>
> The reason was of possible syntactical ambiguities, given operators of
> the form .and., .or., etc. and the Fortran tradition of having no
> reserved words. There was a suggestion of requiring the programmer not
> to write anything ambiguous, but that did not fly.
>
> Personally, I like '%'. If I see it, I know exactly what is going on.
I too like %. Fortran has many comma separated lists. Think about
reading such a list if it was full of structure components using the
period as the selector! The % makes it very clear which is a component
and which is a list item. The thing we got badly wrong in F90 was to
make the order structure%component rather then component%structure (read
component "in"
structure) then we could have array-component%array-structure map
sensibly onto multi-dim-array with the subscript mapping obvious. Ah me!
IF we could have our time over!
>
> Cheers,
>
> John Reid.
--
Lawrie Schonfelder
Honorary Senior Fellow
University of Liverpool
1 Marine Park, West Kirby,
Wirral, UK, CH48 5HN
Phone: +44 (151) 625 6986
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