Professor_StevensUh... yeah. Learning new computer languages is boring. They're all the same, except when they're different, and then you wish they were the same.
The Turtle@Professor_Stevens years ago some outfit offered a product called "Alice: The Personal Pascal."
One feature it had in the pre-AI days was tremendously attractive: rather than yelling at you about a missing semicolon like every other Pascal, if it figured there should be a semicolon and you missed it, it would put it there FOR you! As well as a ton of syntax completion and stuff.
1985.
https://www.google.com/search?q=alice%20personal%20pascal&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
God, I'd have paid brisk money for that. Hell, in 1979 I would have been happy to have it say
--> MISSING SEMI-COLON!!! <--
The VAX 11/780 Pascal compiler we had always flagged a missing semi-colon as an error that it noticed at the first character of the line BELOW the one that was missing a semi-colon. Usually it was something really informative, like, "Unparseable expression found at Line <actual line + 1>."
Still, Pascal's "BEGIN" and "END" saved me from K&R bracket format.
@Professor_Stevens yeah, it KNEW what it needed but not smart enough to just put it there.
I think in those days compiler writers (coders generally) were nervous about presuming things. If the first syntactically incorrect character was at Line Y, Column X, then you KNEW that was a safe place to flag an error. That it was due to a missing ; 99% of the time was the programmer's problem. If your compiler said, "Are you missing a semi-colon?," there would eventually be that case where you WEREN'T missing one. I think that was too much for them to live with back then.
@Professor_Stevens Yeah, a lot of what-if-they-meant. Fuckit, it's always a semicolon or an incorrectly-paired parenthesis. Doesn't matter what language.
Yup, mostly. Compilers these days are great that way. ("Are you missing a cast?") And I can't remember when I stopped having to define library references for the linker, but I don't do that anymore.
Heh. I show my students this picture and ask them what it is. Most genuinely do not know. Most can barely even remember having seen television on a cathode ray tube.