From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 13:45:51 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] terminal - just for fun In-Reply-To: <70C2F527-099F-4BE8-BBFB-CBCAAAEB40C0@tfeb.org> References: <53db573b.rwfkVi3XCkWueUYL%dnied@tiscali.it> <20140801105029.58656ubc05nkkh2d@webmail.mhorton.net> <20140801203508.GF13476@mercury.ccil.org> <70C2F527-099F-4BE8-BBFB-CBCAAAEB40C0@tfeb.org> Message-ID: <20140802034551.GA30208@eureka.lemis.com> On Saturday, 2 August 2014 at 4:27:50 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote: > > On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall wrote: >> >> Hadn't really noticed; I went straight from CP/M to Unix, giving MS-DOS a >> miss. > > MS-DOS understood lowercase: it just didn't care in the common way. > Did filenames have case at all? Only in the sense that all file names were upper case, and lower case names were upshifted. > Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always? No. It was first implemented on the IBM 704, which had a 6 bit BCD character set. No lower case. > I suspect it didn't officially, until Fortran 90, although obviously > many F77 compilers accepted lowercase. More to the point for quite > a long time, whether or not the system would accept lowercase, > people actually *wrote* un uppercase and caps lock was probably > useful for that. Also COBOL I suspect, and probably SQL? Basically, until the introduction of ASCII, there weren't many systems with lower case. IBM had lower case characters with EBCDIC, but didn't seem to use them. I wrote code in FORTRAN and COBOL before the introduction of lower-case, but later compilers I've seen for both languages accepted lower case. I think the real reason for the retention of upper case in these languages was because it made people feel leet. "We're computer programmers, we write in upper case". It's like the disregard for normal punctuation that some style guides require( like putting spaces on the wrong sides of parentheses, or omitting them where required ). Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 196 bytes Desc: not available URL: