In <listserv%[email protected]>, on 12/29/2009
at 11:28 AM, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> said:
>Wouldn't it have been glorious if the original definition of 6-bit BCD
>had specified lower case alphabetics _instead_of_ upper case?
Plus a change, plus c'est la mme chose.
>FORTRAN (excuse me) fortran programs would have been written in lower
>case; data set names would be lower case; and jcl would be lower case
>(but programmers might need to surround 'Upper Case' characters with
>apostrophes lest they be flagged as invalid). There would be no
>tendency for tso to convert to upper case,
Instead, TSO would convert to lower case. I don't see how that would be
any better. The proper design would have been to be case independent from
the get-go; S/360 started with a new, 8 bit, character set.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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