Significant whitespace

Roy Smith roy at panix.com
Sun Jan 3 21:59:02 EST 2010


In article <eqf2k5pna25hb0v7a30p9dpcmsvt46s35q at 4ax.com>,
 Tim Roberts <timr at probo.com> wrote:

> Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> >2) Whitespace was not required in many places.  For example, the following 
> >two statements (this will only make sense in a fixed-width font) are 
> >identical:
> >
> >       DO 10 I = 1, 10
> >       DO10I=1,10
> 
> More than "not required", it was "not relevant".  This led to one of the
> most infamous programming blunders in the early days of the space program,
> when one programmer accidentially typed a period instead of a comma
> resulting in the loss of a satellite:
> 
>        DO 10 I = 1. 10
> 
> What this actually does is store the floating point value "1.1" in a new
> variable called "DO10I".

1.1 or 1.01?  There were some places where a blank was equivalent to a zero 
in a number. I don't remember if this was one of them.



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