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Before ASCII, languages didn’t necessarily mandate what characters to use for operators and other symbols. They defined an abstract syntax, but left it to the i
by bazoom42 3y ago
Before ASCII, languages didn’t necessarily mandate what characters to use for operators and other symbols. They defined an abstract syntax, but left it to the implemention for a particular machine what chracters to use for a given symbol, because of the large variation in keyboards and character sets across machines.
I believe Algol and BCPL did it like that, and C was one of the first languages to specify the exact characters to use for its symbols.
- nine_k 3y agoMore than that; ALGOL-68, for instance, allowed for translating keywords into different national languages, IIRC.
- bazoom42 3y agoYes, this is the same feature. The “abstract token” like “if” is used in the language specification and BNF but in the compiler implementation it could be represented by different characters.