[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  2 August 2014 at  4:27:50 +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>
> On 2 Aug 2014, at 02:49, Dave Horsfall <dave at 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?

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

> Did FORTRAN understand lowercase, always?

No.  It was first implemented on the IBM 704, which had a 6 bit BCD
character set.  No lower case.

> 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?

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.

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 ).

Greg
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