Language change and code breaks

[piet at cs.uu.nl]

>>>>> Sibylle Koczian <Sibylle.Koczian at Bibliothek.Uni-Augsburg.de> (SK) writes:

SK> Piet van Oostrum wrote:
>> 
>> >>>>> Sibylle Koczian <Sibylle.Koczian at Bibliothek.Uni-Augsburg.de> (SK) writes:
>> 
SK> But that's exactly what he says! Algol 60 was before C, as far as I
SK> know, and case-insensitive as was normal at the time.
>> 
>> Sorry, I meant to say that Algol 60 was case sensitive.
>> --

SK> Really? Must have overlooked that: we used teletype machines, no
SK> lowercase letters anyway (where all the keywords uppercase or what?).
SK> Wish I'd kept those yellow punched tapes, they'd look nice on my
SK> pinboard ...

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.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP]
Private email: P.van.Oostrum at hccnet.nl