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From: Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com>
Subject: Re: Caselessness...
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Date: 2001-10-16T15:59:22+00:00
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Al Christians wrote:
> 
> 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.

There was a requirement to allow source to be represented on machines
with a limited character set; for example, '%' could be used instead of
'"', and ':' instead of '#' in based numeric literals; see Annex J and
J.2 in particular. However, this did not make programs using '"'
illegal, while a program with 2 identifiers identical except for case is
illegal, so this doesn't appear to be the reason for case insensitivity.

-- 
Jeffrey Carter