[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw)]

On 2 Aug 2014, at 04:45, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> Only in the sense that all file names were upper case, and lower case
> names were upshifted.

Yes, that's what I meant: you could type at it in lowercase and it didn't care, it just translated to uppercase for you.  So you didn't need a caps lock key.

> 
> 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 ).

And actually that's the only reason for needing a caps lock key really: for systems which *had* no lowercase, then you wouldn't need a caps lock key because you couldn't *type* lowercase!

As a (possibly now dry) Lisp person, case was a very sensitive issue.  Lisp originated on systems without lowercase (indeed, on the IBM 704, of course, like all good things) and most implementations used uppercase symbols.  Common Lisp is fully case-sensitive (symbols can contain mixed case, and in fact can contain any character known to the implementation), but all the standard symbols are uppercase.  However by default the reader translates lowercase to uppercase for symbol names (not for strings of course), and you can also persuade the printer to *print* symbol names in lowercase except where that would be ambiguous, so the language looks as if it is case-insensitive lowercase-preferred, except it isn't at all.  Very much smoke and flame has been produced about this topic, especially among adherents of some of the more extreme sects (Lisp being more correctly thought of as a religion than a programming language).
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20140802/753b62ae/attachment.sig>