Code anachronism

[dave_the_nerd]

So, I watch The Americans, and here's this screenshot:

I'd never seen a language before that used '%' for comments, but apparently that's Prolog.

For real? Or did they make that up?

 

[Cerb]

That looks rather unlike Prolog, which is a pretty pure language. Looks more like a faked Ada, which would have been used in the context of safety related programming.

 

[Aluvus]

Matlab also uses % for comments, but that does not look like Matlab.

 

[Mark R]

That looks rather unlike Prolog, which is a pretty pure language. Looks more like a faked Ada, which would have been used in the context of safety related programming.

^^ This.

It looks like it's trying very hard to be an ADA program, but doesn't quite make it.

 

[Apathetic]

If I remember my Ada correctly, Ada uses "--" to mark a line as a comment.

Dave

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Matlab also uses % for comments, but that does not look like Matlab.

Oh... It even mentions MatLab about halfway down the page.

 

[Mark R]

Oh... It even mentions MatLab about halfway down the page.

Indeed it does. The comments may well be from some matlab code, but the code shown there sure as heck ain't matlab. It looks like ada with a few typos.

My guess is that they found some ada code and hacked it up to make it look legit. Then someone else decided that they needed a bit more text, so copied in some matlab comments to bulk it up a bit.