From owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Wed Oct 15 12:23:23 2003 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by dkuug.dk (8.12.10/8.9.2) id h9FANNVn044687 for sc22wg5-domo; Wed, 15 Oct 2003 12:23:23 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk) X-Authentication-Warning: ptah.dkuug.dk: majordom set sender to owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk using -f Received: from inf.rl.ac.uk (nfs7.inf.rl.ac.uk [130.246.72.7]) by dkuug.dk (8.12.10/8.9.2) with ESMTP id h9FANGEt044682 for ; Wed, 15 Oct 2003 12:23:18 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from j.k.reid@rl.ac.uk) Received: from numerical.cc.rl.ac.uk (numerical [130.246.8.23]) by inf.rl.ac.uk (8.11.6+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id h9FANio20739 for ; Wed, 15 Oct 2003 11:23:44 +0100 (BST) Received: from rl.ac.uk (jkr.cse.rl.ac.uk [130.246.9.202]) by numerical.cc.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA16454 for ; Wed, 15 Oct 2003 11:32:55 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: <3F8D23CD.7050801@rl.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 11:39:09 +0100 From: John Reid Reply-To: j.k.reid@rl.ac.uk Organization: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: WG5 Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.3037) Statement separation/termination Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 0 () Sender: owner-sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Precedence: bulk -------- Original Message -------- To: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.3037) Statement separation/termination In-Reply-To: Message from Richard Maine of "Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:16:28 PDT." <200310141818.h9EIICOC038034@dkuug.dk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:46:28 -0700 From: Van Snyder X-Spam-Score: 0 () On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:16:28 PDT, concerning beginning a line with ";" Richard Maine wrote: >.... Just > removal of a pointless and unobvious restriction. Fortunately it > is a restriction that few people will run into and that will at > worst give a compiler error message instead of bad code (though > I'm told that many compilers just accept it anyway). These sorts of edge cases are occasionally generated by program generators. One usually doesn't have the source for such beasts, and the vendors are sometimes unresponsive, or out of business. It can be tedious, time consuming and error prone to figure out how to work around these cases. We resorted to writing a post-processor -- an expense we could ill afford. Even if you have the source for a program generator -- perhaps because you wrote it yourself -- it's still expensive to track down the handling of the edge case and "repair" it. Any time that an edge case is harmless, and easier for a processor to allow than check, I prefer not to prohibit it. I would put "you have to have a procedure after a CONTAINS statement" into the same category. -- Van Snyder | What fraction of Americans believe Van.Snyder@jpl.nasa.gov | Wrestling is real and NASA is fake? Any alleged opinions are my own and have not been approved or disapproved by JPL, CalTech, NASA, Sean O'Keefe, George Bush, the Pope, or anybody else.