Free-form language
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In
tokens
, and have no other significance.
Most free-form languages descend from ALGOL, including C, Pascal, and Perl. Lisp languages are free-form, although they do not descend from ALGOL. Rexx is mostly free-form, though in some cases whitespace characters are concatenation operators. SQL, though not a full programming language, is also free-form.
Most free-form languages are also
Fortran 77
used particular columns for line numbers, which many structured languages do not use or need.
Structured languages exist which are not free-form, such as
Haskell, Python and others. Many of these use some variant of the off-side rule
, in which indentation, rather than keywords or braces, is used to group blocks of code.
See also
- Indent style
- Obfuscated code
- Curly-bracket programming language– Many free-form languages are within this set.
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