Interesting answer, and goes to my suspicion that "this is the way we've always done it" is part of the answer. But see the comments above. The trouble with th

Interesting answer, and goes to my suspicion that "this is the way we've always done it" is part of the answer. But see the comments above. The trouble with that is that on a line printer those '.'s really don't stand out very much and if you forget one you're toast That's not the half of it. Many years ago the US launched a satellite, part of whose control was done by a Fortran program. Well, one of the developers used a single period in a loop header where he should have had a comma. Unfortunately, in Fortran that was syntactically valid. Problem was, it was hard on the printer he used to see the difference. So the satellite and a bunch of US taxpayer money took a trip to the center of the sun. Ouch.