Significant whitespace

[John Machin]

On Jan 2, 10:29 am, Roy Smith <r... at panix.com> wrote:

>
> To address your question more directly, here's a couple of ways Fortran
> treated whitespace which would surprise the current crop of
> Java/PHP/Python/Ruby programmers:
>
> 1) Line numbers (i.e. the things you could GOTO to) were in column 2-7
> (column 1 was reserved for a comment indicator).  This is not quite
> significant whitespace, it's more like significant indentation.

That would also surprise former FORTRAN programmers (who rarely
referred to the language as "Fortran"). A comment was signified by a C
in col 1. Otherwise cols 1-5 were used for statement labels (the
things you could GOTO), col 6 for a statement continuation indicator,
cols 7-72 for statement text, and cols 73-80 for card sequence numbers.