Re: Caselessness...

[Al Christians <achrist@easystreet.com>]

Well, if you were trying to port code from a case-sensitive machine
to one that could not represent both cases, the code could break if
the language was case-sensitive.  Back when Ada 83 was being developed,
there were many programs still being made machine-readable by keypunch 
machines.  Those machines were not built to represent more than one 
case, IIRC.  It would have been a bad problem to try to put any code
that took advantage of case sensitiveness through those machines, so 
case sensitiveness  would have been a big hit to portability.

Al

Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> 
> 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