Re: Capitalization of language names (was: Newbie in ADA...)

[Bill <wclodius@lanl.gov>]

Larry Kilgallen wrote:<snip>

> As I recall, there was a particular version of the standard at which
> the capitalization was changed from FORTRAN to Fortran.

In 1978, after the Fortran 77  standard had started its review, but before the standard was
published, ANSI published a standard on how to capitalize names.  This standard was later adopted by
ISO. Naturally the Fortan 77 standard, which was not in electronic form, was grandfathered in with
all capitalization. However subsequent standards that had to refer to this language were inconsistent
in their capitalization, did they use that used by the standard itself or that usually required by
ANSI /ISO? The Fortran 90 standard used ANSI/ISO's capitalization to refer to itself and a large cap
"F" followed by low cap "ortran" to refer to the Fortran 77 standard. Subsequent standards been
consistent with the Fortran 90 typography.

FWIW the original Fortran (I) documents, a manual and a user guide, used several different
capitalization schemes, see http://www.fortran.com/ibm.html, but apparently no ForTran. In later
documents IBM standardized on FORTRAN.