2 Aug
2014
2 Aug
'14
9:27 a.m.
On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> 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