specifically to support ALGOL’s /\ and \/ Boolean operators. No source is provided for the claim.)

The trouble probably started for real with the C programming language’s need for two kinds of and and or operators. It could have used just or and bitor, but | and || saved one and three characters, which on an ASR- 33 teletype amounts to 1/10 and 3/10 second, respectively.

It was certainly a fair trade-off—just think about how fast you type yourself— but the price for this temporal frugality was a whole new class of hard-to-spot bugs in C code.

Niklaus Wirth tried to undo some of the damage in Pascal, and the bickering over begin and end would no } take.

C++ is probably the language that milks the ASCII table most by allowing templates and operator overloading. Until you have inspected your data types, you have absolutely no idea what + might do to them (which is probably why there never was enough interest to stage an International Obfuscated C++ Code Contest, parallel to the IOCCC for the C language).

C++ stops short of allowing the programmer to create new operators. You cannot define :-: as an operator; you have to stick to the predefined set. If Bjarne Stroustrup had been more ambitious on this aspect, C++ could have beaten Perl by 10 years to become the world’s second write-only programming language, after APL.

How desperate the hunt for glyphs is in syntax design is exemplified by how Guido van Rossum did away with the canonical scope delimiters in Python, relying instead on indentation for this purpose. What could possibly be of such high value that a syntax designer would brave the controversy this caused? A high-value pair of matching glyphs, { and }, for other use in his syntax could. (This decision also made it impossible to write Fortran programs in Python, a laudable achievement in its own right.)

The best example of what happens if you do the opposite is John Ouster-hout’s Tcl programming language. De-

Result of the Go Language asR33 compatibility test.

 

spite all its desirable properties—such as being created as a language to be embedded in tools—it has been widely spurned, often with arguments about excessive use of, or difficult-to-figure-out placement of, {} and [].

My disappointment with Rob Pike’s Go language is that the rest of the world has moved on from ASCII, but he did not. Why keep trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade?

Unicode has the entire gamut of Greek letters, mathematical and technical symbols, brackets, brockets, sprockets, and weird and wonderful glyphs such as “Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave” (0x23c7). Why do we still have to name variables Ome-gaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?

The most recent programming language syntax development that had anything to do with character sets apart from ASCII was when the ISO-C standard committee adopted trigraphs to make it possible to enter C source code on computers that do not have ASCII’s 95 characters available—a bold and decisive step in the wrong direction.

While we are at it, have you noticed that screens are getting wider and wider these days, and that today’s text processing programs have absolutely no problem with multiple columns, insert displays, and hanging enclosures being placed in that space?

But programs are still decisively ver-
tical, to the point of being horizontally
challenged. Why can’t we pull minor
scopes and subroutines out in that
right-hand space and thus make them
supportive to the understanding of the
main body of code?

Related articles on queue.acm.org

A Conversation with Arthur Whitney http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242

You’re Doing It Wrong

Poul-Henning Kamp

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327

how not to Write Fortran in Any Language

Donn Seeley

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039535

Reference

1. pike, r. systems software research is irrelevant; http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf.

 

Poul-henning Kamp ( [e-mail]) has programmed computers for 26 years and is the inspiration behind bikeshed.org. His software has been widely adopted as “under the hood” building blocks. His most recent project is the Varnish Http accelerator, which is used to speed up large Web sites such as facebook.

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