Keven Hall wrote: | It's a slippery slope: once they have us using mixed case we'll be | weakened and confused and that's when they'll go after EBCDIC.
This is clearly jocular, but I resad it trwice to be sure that it was, and my initial suspicion that it could perhaps have been serious is indicative of something disagreeable. All-majuscule text was a disagreeable requirement forced upon us by the limitations of key punches, line printers, six-bit character codes, badly designed software, and the like. These obstacles to the use of a full character set have all been removed; the practice of clinging to all-caps text is no longer necessary or defensible. Unicode is available and usable, and its use moots the stale EBCDIC vs ASCII quarrel. Let's get on with it. HLASM source programs can, for example, be written in mixed case; and they are more intelligible and easier to read when they are. (Sadly, I have found that an all-caps assembly-language source is a likely---though not of course an infallible---indication that its writer is no longer current.) The viability of mainframes will not be ensured by adhering to wornout, anyway adventitious conventions. Colonel Blimps are unattractive figures wherever they are found. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA p.s. These arguments apply mutatis mutandis to COBOL source programs too.
