50 años de Pascal
50 años de Pascal » cacm.acm.org | cacm.acm.org
Programming-Languages
The curious case of the switch statement
The earliest incarnation I can find is in ALGOL 58. The original description of ALGOL 58 is a fascinating read — it’s written like a math paper, with literal text in italics and heavy use of subscripts. Character classes are even named by Greek letters, with λ representing letters and so on. The example program at the end is completely incomprehensible, with almost every variable being a single letter and labels forming their own entire column on the left side. I guess that last bit came from FORTRAN. ...