syntax difference

[Gregory Ewing]

Bart wrote:
> But 40 years 
> ago it was just 'readln a,b,c'; it was just taken for granted.

The problem with something like that is that it's really only
useful for throwaway code. For any serious application, you need
to deal with the possibility of malformed input, producing helpful
diagnostics, etc. And often the input isn't going to be in such a
uniform format that you know exactly what to expect next.

So it's debable whether it's a good idea to put something with such
limited applicability into the core language or standard library.

Handling input well is fundamentally much more complicated than
producing output. I don't think this is as "basic" as you make out.

-- 
Greg