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Talk:Here document: Difference between revisions
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→Difference from multi-line string literals
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<br>Some languages support multi-line literals, but those languages are from an age of fixed-length records, when programmers still used [punched] cards. [[User:Gerard Schildberger|Gerard Schildberger]] 08:46, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
:: Since apparently [[wp:Punched card#Standards|punched cards]] have had standards issued for them as recently as 1990, "when programmers still used [punched] cards" must include the origin time for many languages. Meanwhile, Perl [which admittedly appeared in 1987] supports both multiline string literals and hereis documents. So, I guess I am not really sure what point you are trying to make. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 19:53, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
::: I wasn't making that profound a point. I was just pointing out from a historical reference on why (or how) some literals were or weren't continued, and those that did stemmed from the use of fixed length records, and those records were almost always from 80-byte (fixed) records, er ..., [punched] cards. (Yes, I know, some cards weren't 80 columns.) One computer, I believe some IBM 70x or 70xx series, could read in punched cards in column binary (which was much faster than reading the punched card in character mode), but since the wordsize (er, make that a double word) was only 72 bits, the last eight columns were ignored, so columns 73-->80 were used for placing (punching) sequencial numbers in them to aid the hapless programmer who dropped a deck in reassembling the schmuck's program in the proper order. It was not a rare occurance, as this schmuck can attest to. If the programmer was being rude to the computer operator (and I was both a student and a computer operator), sometimes the deck got dropped when the deck was being handed back to the short tempered programmer. Oops. I never did such a thing, because it was a lot of work to reassemble the beast, and most everybody (that is, students) didn't bother keypunching the sequence numbers onto the cards). But it happened, and nobody gave any lip to those computer operators (at least, to those who returned the programs at the computer (dutch) door. -- [[User:Gerard Schildberger|Gerard Schildberger]] 22:08, 20 June 2012 (UTC)
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