Significant whitespace

[Tim Roberts]

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".
-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.