3 Aug
2014
3 Aug
'14
12:47 p.m.
On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
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.
ISTR that the mighty 1403 printer had the "text train" - type TN, if
memory serves. It slowed down printing (not as many duplications) but you
got lower case and a few more symbols. You quickly learned to never leave
a cup of coffee on the lid, because it lifted automatically...
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 ).
I had a boss once who had this annoying habit of writing "(\ blah\ )" in
his Nroff documents.
-- Dave