2 Aug
2014
2 Aug
'14
11:24 a.m.
On 2 Aug 2014, at 04:45, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)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).