Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site wdl1.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!hpda!fortune!wdl1!jbn From: jbn@wdl1.UUCP Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: Reading programs left-to-right. Message-ID: <647@wdl1.UUCP> Date: Thu, 22-Aug-85 20:22:11 EDT Article-I.D.: wdl1.647 Posted: Thu Aug 22 20:22:11 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 25-Aug-85 13:13:21 EDT Sender: notes@wdl1.UUCP Organization: Ford Aerospace, Western Development Laboratories Lines: 35 Nf-ID: #R:boring:-657100:wdl1:8600007:000:1026 Nf-From: wdl1!jbn Aug 14 12:59:00 1985 It's been done. NELIAC, an early Algol dialect with a singularly simple compiler, used a right arrow as the assignment operator and placed the source on the left and the destination on the right. This was about 1960; the disappearance of the right arrow when character sets became standardized seemed to kill off interest in NELIAC and assignments of this type along with it. Regarding COBOL-60: There are all these dummies running around touting ``natural language interfaces'' that are just keyword-driven parsers with some noise words. That's been done too. Here's some COBOL-60: Assignment: MOVE 100 TO X. Arithmetic: ADD 1 TO A. SUBTRACT 1 FROM A GIVING B. DIVIDE A BY B ON OVERFLOW STOP RUN. MULTIPLY CORRESPONDING TABLE-1 BY TABLE-2 GIVING TABLE-3; Subroutine call: PERFORM ZILCH. Code patching: ALTER ZILCH TO PROCEED THROUGH ALTERNATE-CODE-SECTION. All this junk has been taken out of the language. One now writes COMPUTE X=A+1. just like everybody else. John Nagle