Infocom on PDP-11

[John Foust]

At 01:38 PM 5/11/2005, Tom Jennings wrote:
>Oh yeah, it has !TERRIBLE! features in it! Computed gotos are one
>of the more amusing, and some of the side effects of it are just
>plain bizarre.

The inverted syntax of "goto 60 if expression" was another
that caught my eye; it certainly reproduced in BASIC+ and today 
still lives in Perl for the same ancestral reasons.

>But you have to feel for the poor bastards, trying to work out
>these issues where you don't even have a character mapping you can
>rely on. All the quoting/escaping bizarreness, that the unix Algol
>interpreter a60 supports. Ugh.

One of the aforementioned references points out that Algol preceded
ASCII and influenced its development.  At one point, they wanted
'do' and other keywords to be their own character (!) so you 
could have 'do' as a variable name?

Algol, of course, lives on in Algore, an early supporting 
component of the Internet.

- John