Carl W. Brown <cbrown at xnetinc dot com> wrote: > That is true. The half width katakana did replace the small roman > letters. In those days one rarely used lower case and Japanese > support was usually limited to katakana. It let people replace the > print train with an English/Japanese one and not make any other > application changes other than messages and text. Just try to write > in C/C++ without lower case.
Absolutely true. But in the 1960s, C had not yet been invented (let alone C++) and the dominant programming languages were FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, and a newly invented beginner's language called BASIC. Even today, code in those languages is typically all-uppercase -- even the names of the languages themselves are all-uppercase! (Yes, I know "C" is all-uppercase too. And no, don't tell me about Visual Basic, which is as different from the original 1964 BASIC as C is from Pascal.) -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
