🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1991Mar24.121900.7141@cs.UAlberta.CA> lnds@obed.uucp (Mark Israel) writes:

>   Algol68 is full of gotchas.  Try explaining to a new user why
>you can't say "a[i] +:= 1", where a is a flex array.  Try explaining
>why operators scope differently from procedures.  Try explaining
>why "exit" is defined so that in the context where you'd intuitively
>most often want to use it (IF something THEN EXIT FI), it does
>nothing at all.

The places where ALGOL 68 got in a mess were the few places where it gave up
being orthogonal. The whole FLEX business, for example, sticks out like one
big sore thumb. It was only put in, as Van Wijngaarden explained to me, in
order to provide STRINGs (which are indeed nice, but could have been a
primitive).

Likewise, EXIT is a leftover from pre structured programming days. I do not
think I have ever used it in anger.