Dimensionality of program code (was: Exceptional coding style)

[Era Scarecrow]

On Thursday, 17 January 2013 at 20:17:06 UTC, Stewart Gordon 
wrote:
> And in most languages, a program/module is essentially just a 
> sequence of tokens, and as such is one-dimensional.  We might 
> look at it in a two-dimensional form, but this two-dimensional 
> layout means nothing as far as the program structure and 
> semantics are concerned.  And again, you could think of it as a 
> curve, passing from the beginning of each line to the end and 
> then to the beginning of the next line.

  As I recall for the compilers very early on, all comments and 
unneeded whitespace were simply removed before compiling, leaving 
you with one very long command string. The /**/ comment syntax 
makes perfect sense in this case; Later tools more memory and 
hardware power make it more manageable; but // requires 2d code 
to properly compile until the comments are stripped.

// c example, originally isprime and main don't have
// return types, defaulting to int instead.
int isprime(int n){int cnt=2;if(n<2)return 
0;for(;cnt<n;cnt++)if((n%cnt)==0)return 0;return 1;}int 
main(){int cnt=2;for(;cnt<1000000;cnt++)if 
(isprime(cnt))printf("%d \n", cnt);}

  It's one of the reasons the syntax requires a semicolon after 
each statement so it can tell obviously where something ends.