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This was inherited from Prolog, which ends terms with a full stop. Most other languages didn't want to handle the syntactic ambiguity of using the period as a
by samatman 6y ago
This was inherited from Prolog, which ends terms with a full stop.
Most other languages didn't want to handle the syntactic ambiguity of using the period as a decimal point and a statement separator.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoI thought of mentioning the Prolog heritage. Weirdly CSS (having the worst syntax consistency of any language I can think of) is hyphen-heavy and solves its negation infix operator ambiguity well: it needs to be surrounded by whitespace. For Prolog/Erlang, I think the preceding syntax is disambiguating enough
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoCOBOL terminates some statements with a period. And before that FLOW-MATIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC