In computer programming, a free-form language is a programming language in which the positioning of characters on the page in program text is not significant. Program text does not need to be placed in specific columns as on old punched card systems, and frequently ends of lines are not significant. Whitespace is used to delimit tokens, and does not have other significance.
Most free-form languages descend from Algol, including C, Pascal, and Perl. These are also structured programming languages, which is sometimes thought to go along with the free-form syntax: Earlier imperative programming languages such as Fortran 77 used particular columns for line numbers, which structured languages don't use or need. Lisp languages are also free-form, although they do not descend from Algol.
One recent language which has abandoned parts of the free-form idiom is Python, which uses indentation with whitespace to delimit program blocks. Some critics regard this as a throwback, and find Python text harder to read and edit as it lacks the obvious punctuation of C or Pascal. Python aficionados, however, find that it improves readability: since indentation is commonly used in structured languages to make block structure visible, Python's use of whitespace ensures that the two are consistent.
This type of form development, therefore, while of the greatest interest for the general history of language, does not directly concern us now in our effort to understand the nature of grammatical concepts and their tendency to degenerate into purely formal counters.
No language wholly fails to distinguish noun and verb, though in particular cases the nature of the distinction may be an elusive one.
There are languages, for instance, which have as elaborate an apparatus of negative forms for the verb as Greek has of the optative or wish-modality.
In a great many languages composition is confined to what we may call the delimiting function, that is, of the two or more compounded elements one is given a more precisely qualified significance by the others, which contribute nothing to the formal build of the sentence.
Sometimes both types are used in the same language, as in Yana, where “beef” is “bitter-venison” but “deer-liver” is expressed by “liver-deer.” The compounded object of a verb precedes the verbal element in Paiute, Nahuatl, and Iroquois, follows it in Yana, Tsimshian, 4 and the Algonkin languages.
In some languages, such as Latin and Russian, the suffixes alone relate the word to the rest of the sentence, the prefixes being confined to the expression of such ideas as delimit the concrete significance of the radical element without influencing its bearing in the proposition.
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