Olin Lathrop wrote:

> Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>> failed to bring up any kind of evidence besides a few
>> examples of really old languages that do make the distinction.
> 
> Only one is required for a existance proof.  I mentioned a few others for
> good measure.

I really think you should do some reading of what other people write,
rather than building your strawmen out of nothing. Nobody ever said that
the distinction doesn't exist. But you claimed that there is a distinction
that is relevant for the discussion at hand, and that it is of general
relevance (that is, outside the languages that make it).

For example, I haven't ever seen (in a generally relevant computer science
publication) programming languages classified by whether or not they make
that distinction. Now I don't doubt that there is some obscure paper about
this, but the mere fact that you can't bring up anything from computer
science (not just some syntax examples) that would support your claim tells
me that you claimed something that's not much more than an opinion of
yours. This may be something extremely important to you, but it isn't to
the world at large. 

> You keep mentioning assembly language, but that's irrelevant. Strictly
> speaking there are no subroutines in assembly, only call and return
> instructions. You may build things with these instructions you call
> subroutines, but that's your abstraction, not the language's. Where in
> MPASM, for example, is the subroutine or function definition operator,
> keyword, or whatever?

There is none. That's my point. It doesn't make this distinction. It has
one mechanism (call/return; assembly statements are quite similar to what
keywords are in C, for example: the element of the language), which is used
to create indistinguishable functions and procedures and subroutines
(however you want to call them).

Using a label and a return statement ("keyword") is no different (albeit on
a different abstraction level) from using the Procedure keyword to create a
subroutine.

Gerhard

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