From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,87555f9f9a68a23a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-10-16 11:44:28 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-post-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail From: Al Christians Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Caselessness... Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 11:44:27 -0700 Organization: Public Property Software Message-ID: <3BCC800B.16DF2AF7@easystreet.com> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <3BCB2FDA.8060807@look.ca> <3BCB6EF6.C76D26FF@boeing.com> <3BCB7ADF.8F6EA596@easystreet.com> <3BCC595A.9CDFBEE4@boeing.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: newsabuse@supernews.com Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:14724 Date: 2001-10-16T11:44:27-07:00 List-Id: 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