Optional semi-colons

[Robert J Woodhead]

In article <29785 at apple.Apple.COM> desnoyer at Apple.COM (Peter Desnoyers) writes:
>A final comment - I spent a lot of time programming in CLU one
>semester. In CLU, the block structure is unambiguous, and there is no
>need for statement terminators. The end effect was that the compiler
>would come up with an error many statements after the incorrect line.

You think this was bad?  Back when I was a Teaching Assistant at the
Cornell School for Hotel Administration, I was assigned the dubious
honor of debugging some Hotel Management programs written in "MOBAL",
or, as we referred to it, "The Language of Kings."

MOBAL ran on microNOVA microminicomputers, and was a "compiler" that
was actually a multipass macro expansion system that ended up generating
assembly language source code.

The problem was, it had an arcane syntax and if you made a single "dot i
or cross t" type of typing error, you got (and this is not an exaggeration)
47 pages of multipass recursive error messages, none of which had anything
to do with the original error.  It got to the point where I threw some
darts at the source code in an effort to find the bugs.

The day that the proud author of MOBAL visited us was probably the only
day in my life where I contemplated torturing another human being.  Death
was too good for this turkey.  Unfortunately, the worst tortures my
fever'd brain could devise all involved programming in MOBAL.

 
-- 
Robert J Woodhead, Biar Games, Inc.  ...!uunet!biar!trebor | trebor at biar.UUCP
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