Language change and code breaks

[Donn Cave]

Quoth piet at cs.uu.nl:
...
| I know some people had to use Algol 60 dialects with only a single case. We
| were fortunate enough to have real Friden Flexowriters with upper and
| lowercase. Keywords (printed in bold) where made with backspaces and
| underlines, and had the nice property that any combination of letter,
| underscore and backspace that put the underscore under the letter made that
| letter bold. The Flexowriters produced papertape, which was fed into the
| computer.
|
| Maybe the case-insensitivity of other early programming languages was just
| caused by the lack of both cases on input (and output) devices.

Or worse the lack of a full ASCII character set on the host computer.
My first programs were on a CDC Cyber mainframe with a 60 bit word;
we had several character sets at our disposal, but nearly all programming
was done in 6 bit "display code", no lower case.  (The only exception
was a C compiler, which - no offense to the Texas university where it
was created, certainly it was a noble effort - wasn't very useful.)
That would be laughable today, but the computer world was a lot more
diverse at that level then, and we inherit a lot from those days.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu