From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Feb 12 2003 - 12:03:22 EST
Carl W. Brown <cbrown at xnetinc dot com> wrote:
> That is true. The half width katakana did replace the small roman
> letters. In those days one rarely used lower case and Japanese
> support was usually limited to katakana. It let people replace the
> print train with an English/Japanese one and not make any other
> application changes other than messages and text. Just try to write
> in C/C++ without lower case.
Absolutely true. But in the 1960s, C had not yet been invented (let
alone C++) and the dominant programming languages were FORTRAN, COBOL,
PL/I, and a newly invented beginner's language called BASIC. Even
today, code in those languages is typically all-uppercase -- even the
names of the languages themselves are all-uppercase!
(Yes, I know "C" is all-uppercase too. And no, don't tell me about
Visual Basic, which is as different from the original 1964 BASIC as C is
from Pascal.)
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
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