Re: origin of the index syntax

[Bill Denney]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, Francesco Potorti` wrote:

> Ted Harding:
> > Some languages distinguish between a function call like fname(...)
> > and reference to an indexed variable like vname[...] by different
> > syntax. C is such a language, and originated in 1972 (though it
> > evolved from languages going back to the early 60s).
>
> Thank you for the interesting excursus on the history of the (..) and
> [..] syntaxes, but that's not what I meant :-)
>
> I meant to ask this: If I want to take a slice of a multidimensional
> array, I can express it as [1:10, 3, 0.1, [3 6], :].  Is there a common
> name for this kind of syntax?

I think that has its origins in fortran (I'm positive that it's part of 
fortran 90), so you could say it's fortran style, but that doesn't sound 
like quite what you're looking for.

Bill

--
"When people tell you how young you look, they are also telling you how 
old you are."
  -- Cary Grant



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