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Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2003 11:31:24 -0400
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: Case sensitivity (was Re: no title)
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Date: 2003-06-03T11:31:24-04:00
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John R. Strohm wrote:
 > Making the language case-insensitive fixes that problem,
> by preventing it from ever occurring.

You might be right if the language were case-insensitive,
but it isn't. Character and string literals are sensitive
to case. It's only identifiers which ignore case. So your
hypothetical mainframe environment couldn't handle
     Put("Hello, world!");

And speaking of such primitive environments, I started
programming in college on a very early UNIX system on a
PDP-11 using uppercase-only terminals that used rolls of
paper, not display screens. The drivers translated all
input to lower case internally, and if you wanted upper
case, you escaped the letter with a backslash. The system
would then print such actual upper case letters with a
backslash prefix. So it was certainly possible to use
mixed case even on such a platform.