lowercase, was Re: ada paper critic

["David Thompson" <david.thompson1@worldnet.att.net>]

Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> wrote :
> "Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:
> > ... And its really important to remember that as Ada was emerging into
> > the light of day, there was still a lot of equipment out in the world that
> > didn't support lower case. (Line printers being a common example.)
>
An example, but uppercase-only (monocase) terminals were
AIR a (much) more common issue.  And I never saw a dualcase
keypunch, although there were "Hollerith" (card) codes defined
for lowercase.  It was not uncommon to (need to) enter escape
sequences or commands in monocase input and thereby
(be able) to get nice dualcase output on the printer.

> But that can't explain it, because [ARM83] used lower-case boldface for
> reserved words.
>
> Some of those printers *could* support boldface, by backspacing and
> overprinting. ;-)
>
_Line_ printers can't backspace.  Instead they print without advancing
the paper, allowing overprint.  In the "ASA" printer control associated
with FORTRAN (but used other places also) where the first "column"
of each line is a printer control character, '+' indicates overprint.
Line printers using character-serial interfaces usually used CR,
i.e. all first characters CR-no-LF all overlay characters CR LF.

MDC went on to say:
> .... (To this day, C fashion for things
> created with #define is to use all caps.)

_Most_ #define'd things, yes.  (Not, for example, macro versions
of library functions.)  But of course this is precisely because
nearly everything else in C is lowercase or mixed-mostly-lower,
and so upper-only glaringly stands out.

--
- David.Thompson 1 now at worldnet.att.net