shrubble
3 hours ago
The Etudes book is considered a classic, especially among FSU programmers-the book was licensed for a small amount, translated into Russian and used in many classrooms.
kragen
3 hours ago
It's absolutely a classic!
Compiler for "Easy" language from "Etudes for Programmers" book (1978)
22 pointsposted 9 days ago
by begoon8 Comments
ape4
4 hours ago
The "FI" for "endif" is like bash.
The semicolons are like C.
The "PROGRAM" section is like COBOL.
kragen
3 hours ago
The "fi" thing arose during the Algol-68 process, which Steve Bourne participated in, which is why he put it in his shell. (He would have put "od" there too to terminate "do" if it wasn't already used for a hexdumper.) You also find it in, for example, Dijkstra's Discipline of Programming.
Semicolons were widely used as statement separators in Algol-family languages, but in Easy they seem to be statement terminators, so they are apparently like C rather than like earlier Algol-family languages such as Pascal.
Pascal also had the "program" thing. I'm not sure if earlier Algol languages did?
IAmBroom
3 hours ago
COBOL precedes Pascal.
kragen
3 hours ago
Yes, of course it does. I didn't mean to imply that COBOL got it from Pascal. I meant that the practice was much more widespread than just COBOL, and given that the rest of Easy is clearly an Algol-family language very similar to Pascal or (then-draft) Ada, that's probably where he got it.
dukoid
5 hours ago
I was assuming it's something similar to PL/0 but the grammar looks quite extensive...
Joker_vD
4 hours ago
Basically Algol, but with gratuitous "SET" to simplify parsing assignment statements, and without generic "BEGIN" braces: those are baked into "DO"/"THEN"/"ELSE".
You can probably straightforwardly translate it to Golang by running through a C preprocessor with an obvious set of macros.