Re: Symbol tables and scopes

"David R Tribble" <david@tribble.com>
24 Feb 2006 09:42:34 -0500

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Related articles
[14 earlier articles]
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david.thompson1@worldnet.att.net (Dave Thompson) (2006-02-14)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes alexc@TheWorld.com (Alex Colvin) (2006-02-14)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes nathan.moore@cox.net (Nathan Moore) (2006-02-17)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes alexc@TheWorld.com (Alex Colvin) (2006-02-17)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes DrDiettrich@compuserve.de (Hans-Peter Diettrich) (2006-03-05)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes henry@spsystems.net (2006-03-05)
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From: "David R Tribble" <david@tribble.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 24 Feb 2006 09:42:34 -0500
Organization: http://groups.google.com
References: 06-01-10106-02-015 06-02-021 06-02-049 06-02-095
Keywords: Cobol, symbols
Posted-Date: 24 Feb 2006 09:42:34 EST

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>> One interesting case is PL/I, which allows partial qualification
>> for structures. True ambiguous cases are not allowed, but cases
>> that could be considered ambiguous at different nesting levels
>> are allowed.
>


Dave Thompson wrote:
> So does/did COBOL. Except that it calls them 'group's and writes the
> subpath in reverse order: ZIP-CODE OF HOME-ADDRESS OF CUST-REC. But
> since COBOL originally didn't have nested routines at all and still
> makes them rather clumsy, it encourages large routines with lots of
> functionality and lots of variables, many of which are large
> complicated structures often with similar elements, increasing the
> likelihood of collisions/ambiguities, resulting in many burnt-once
> programmers who always fully qualify everything.


It certainly helped that COBOL allowed for names up to 30 characters
long. How long did it take other languages (FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal,
C) to get to this point?

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