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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:56928

On 10/16/13 8:53 PM, Mark Janssen wrote:
>> And your earlier idea that punched cards didn't have tokens is wildly
>> ignorant of the state of software and languages 50 years ago.
> Please tell me how you parsed tokens with binary switches 50 years
> ago.  Your input is rubbish.

The mention of punched cards was from you:

    Prior to that [the '70s] you have punch cards where there's no meaningful definition of "parsing" because there are no tokens.

I have no idea what you mean by this.  Punched cards are an input mechanism.  Each one held 80 characters (ever wonder why people are so fixated on 80-character lines?).  Those characters could represent text just as 80 characters in today's text files do.  It was common for those cards to hold lines of program text which were parsed into tokens, etc.

Sure, go back far enough and you get to switches, etc, but programs have been input as text for far longer than you think.  Fortran was first proposed 60 years ago, and was parsed as tokens.  Lisp and Cobol both happened before 1960.

In any case, I've gone back to read the emails where you wrote this, and I can't make sense of how tokens come into the originl topic at all.

You seem drawn to sweeping statements about the current state and history of computer science, but then make claims like this about punched cards that just make no sense.

--Ned.