Re: [pure-lang-users] gedit pure.lang

[Eddie R. <er...@bm...>]

On Sat 30/08/08  9:41 AM , John Cowan co...@cc... sent:
> I suspect that ".5" got started in Fortran on the IBM keypunch
> machines,where typing "0" was not only extra physical work just to push
> down thekey, but made it that much more likely that you'd run off the end of
> the card.

I could not find anything about the history of leaving off the leading 0 but it would make sense for FORTRAN programmers to do that 
with punch cards. I lost my Web page (Dr. Math?) but I saw something about a company using leaving off 0s in front of the decimal point 
in probability to indicate that a probability can never be greater than one. All of my senior level probability and statistics books 
use leading zeros. Oh well.

e.r.