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From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>
To: Brian Walden <tuhs@cuzuco.com>
Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] # (was Re: sh: cmd | >file)
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2020 22:25:39 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAE17BA2-C3E4-4EA2-B174-F23624340356@bitblocks.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <202001080520.0085KdTi008574@cuzuco.com>

> On Jan 7, 2020, at 9:20 PM, Brian Walden <tuhs@cuzuco.com> wrote:
> 
> Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Tue, 7 Jan 2020, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> 
>>> In Algol68  # ... # is one of the forms for block comments!
>> 
>> Interesting...  All we had at university though was ALGOL W (as far as I
>> know; there were several languages that mere students could not use, such
>> as FORTRAN H).
> 
> Yes, but when was it implemented? Kernighan is first ever if it is not
> before 1974. So I decided to look and it took me down a rabbit hole of
> ALGOL taht leads back to Bourne shell and then right back to # (but in C)

Tanenbaum’s “A tutorial on Algol 68” published in Computing Surveys, June 1976
mentions that # is one of the (four) ways a comment may be enclosed.

https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/74119499/11057

An earlier paper “Algol68 with fewer tears” by C H Lindsey, 1972
also mentions # as an alternate symbol.

https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-pdf/15/2/176/1002964/15-2-176.pdf


  reply	other threads:[~2020-01-08  6:26 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-01-08  5:20 Brian Walden
2020-01-08  6:25 ` Bakul Shah [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2020-01-06  6:30 Brian Walden
2020-01-06 22:50 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-01-07  0:39   ` Warner Losh
2020-01-08  2:44     ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-07 15:24   ` Clem Cole
2020-01-07 22:13     ` Dave Horsfall
2020-01-07 22:26   ` Bakul Shah
2020-01-07 22:56     ` Dave Horsfall

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