Re: Caselessness...

[Al Christians <achrist@easystreet.com>]

Wasn't there originally a requirement to target some machines that
didn't support upper and lower case characters?  For example, the 
typical printer chains that were used on mainframe printers in the early 
1980's didn't have lower case characters on them at all. Case sensitive
would be a major debacle if a machine like that was used to print
code listings.


Al



Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> 
> Ted Dennison wrote:
> >
> > This decision was made *for a reason*. Its perfectly legitimate for a beginner
> > to wonder why certain desicions were made with the language. However, I don't
> > think its at all legitimate for Ada novices to try to come in here and
> > repeatedly argue against every single decision the language designers made,
> > which is the situation this NG seems to be in now. I really gets to be
> > exhausting trying to explain the rationale for things over and over again to
> > people who come in here thinking the've single-handedly solved the languages
> > "problem", and aren't interested in hearing why things were put the way they
> > are.
> 
> It would be useful to be able to reference this reason. I have not found
> any justification for case insensitivity in the Ada Rationale or the
> Ada-83 Rationale. Maybe I missed it. Another possibility is that this
> was a requirement imposed on the language design, in which case the
> justification would probably be found in Steelman.
> 
> --
> Jeffrey Carter