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A comment on Why do long options start with two dashes? (2019). Parent comment

Re:Why do long options start with two dashes? (2019) by samatman on Thursday April 08, 2021 @10:23PM (#26746072)
This was inherited from Prolog, which ends terms with a full stop.

Most other languages didn't want to handle the syntactic ambiguity of using the period as a decimal point and a statement separator.

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Re:Why do long options start with two dashes? (2019) by eyelidlessness on Thursday April 08, 2021 @10:37PM (#26746138)
I thought of mentioning the Prolog heritage. Weirdly CSS (having the worst syntax consistency of any language I can think of) is hyphen-heavy and solves its negation infix operator ambiguity well: it needs to be surrounded by whitespace.

For Prolog/Erlang, I think the preceding syntax is disambiguating enough

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Re:Why do long options start with two dashes? (2019) by GoblinSlayer on Friday April 09, 2021 @05:48AM (#26748539)
COBOL terminates some statements with a period. And before that FLOW-MATIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC
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