Whitespace insignificance

[brokhiv]

8XP

• most modern languages use whitespace as delimiters, but BabyCobol does not use it at all, following old versions of FORTRAN
• whitespace characters in the input are preserved, if they occur inside quoted strings, comment line or identification division clause values
• all other whitespace characters in code columns are ignored, even those breaking a keyword or field name in half
• in the face of ambiguity, the original whitespace is used for resolution
• assuming that ACCOUNTNUMBER, ACCOUNT-NUMBER, ACCOUNT and NUMBER are all defined fields:
• IF ACCOUNT-NUMBER = 0 THEN STOP. (uses the ACCOUNT-NUMBER field)
• IF ACCOUNT - NUMBER = 0 THEN STOP. (uses the difference between fields called ACCOUNT and NUMBER)
• MOVE 42 TO ACCOUNTNUMBER. (assigns the value to the ACCOUNTNUMBER field)
• MOVE 42 TO ACCOUNT NUMBER. (assigns the value to both fields ACCOUNT and NUMBER)
• MOVE 42 TO ACCOUNT NUM BER. (invalid since whitespace information is not clear enough to disambiguate)
• whitespace is the literal space symbol, tab, newline, CR/LF, etc

[brokhiv]

Horrible