From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Free-form language
Free-form language
In computer programming, a free-form language is a pro- along with the free-form syntax: Earlier imperative pro-
gramming language in which the positioning of charac- gramming languages such as Fortran 77 used particular
ters on the page in program text is not significant. Pro- columns for line numbers, which many structured lan-
gram text does not need to be placed in specific columns guages don’t use or need. However, there exist struc-
as on old punched card systems, and frequently ends of tured languages which are not free-form, such as Python,
lines are not significant. Whitespace is used to delimit to- in which the indentation level of each line is important.
kens, and does not have other significance.
Most free-form languages descend from Algol, includ-
ing C, Pascal, and Perl. Lisp languages are also free-form,
See also
although they do not descend from Algol. REXX is mostly • Indent style
free-form, though in some cases whitespace is a concate- • Obfuscated code
nation operator. SQL, though not a full-fledged program- • Curly bracket programming language - most free-
ming language, is also free-form. form languages fall within this category
Most free-form languages are also structured pro- • Off-side rule - using indentation rather than
gramming languages, which is sometimes thought to go punctuation to express scope
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