From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 04:27:50 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] terminal - just for fun In-Reply-To: References: <53db573b.rwfkVi3XCkWueUYL%dnied@tiscali.it> <20140801105029.58656ubc05nkkh2d@webmail.mhorton.net> <20140801203508.GF13476@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: <70C2F527-099F-4BE8-BBFB-CBCAAAEB40C0@tfeb.org> 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? I can't remember. Interestingly, other than minority systems (Unix!) the modern standard for filenames seems to be to remember but not care about case: this is what the Mac does (with the default FS options) and I am pretty sure what Windows does too. I've been bitten several times by Mac things which fail horribly because there's a README and a ReadMe in a tarball. Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always? 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? There was a lot of code written in those languages. --tim