On Dec 22, 2011, at 13:53, John Gilmore wrote: > 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. > And until I read your message, the idea of "jocular" did not occur to me; I saw it as sarcastic and anxious hyperbole, not much beyond sentiments expressed earnestly in these fora by Shane and Steve.
> 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. > That quarrrel will be moot only when I can code my assembler source and JCL in Unicode (my preference would be UTF-8) and dispense with EBCDIC altogether. (But if it weren't EBCDIC, it wouldn't be JCL, would 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 writer is no longer current.)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. > I'm in substantial agreement; I've been quite public with such sentiments. I suspect John M. would agree likewise. -- gil
