[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, John Cowan wrote:

> I was working at the whiteboard during a job interview once. I had been
> asked to write a function to report if its input had balanced parentheses. 
> No problem: I wrote an RD parser in Python (which I prefer for
> whiteboarding) to detect balance and return True if the parse was successful
> and False if EOF was reached.

RD is a bit over the top, isn't it?

Pseudocode:

    set counter to 0

    while !EOF
    do
	read char
	char == "(" -> counter++
	char == ")" -> counter--
	abort "Unbalanced: )" if counter < 0
    done

    abort "Unbalanced: (" if counter > 0

Untested, of course :-)

-- Dave