Talk:Calendar - for "REAL" programmers: Difference between revisions
Talk:Calendar - for "REAL" programmers (view source)
Revision as of 14:43, 2 June 2011
, 12 years ago→Discussion Cont.
m (→Discussion Cont.: My bad. PDP-10's 36-bit word stored 5 x 7-bit bytes, not 7 x 5-bit bytes.) |
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:But 6 bit could just as easily be all lower case as all uppercase. And there are other characters that would also be eliminated if this were really being targeted at a 6 bits-per-character platform. Meanwhile, some languages become unusable with this "all uppercase" constraint. Mind you, it's a cute constraint. But it's also silly. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 18:15, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
Actually - kind of - I agree with you... 6-bit is the criteria. Although I have never heard of a strictly lower case hardware platform.
:I think that is because older devices such as the teletype ksr-33 (or a selectric with an APL type ball or any of a variety of others) would only print upper case. (The teletype handled ascii but lower case letters looked like upper case characters. The there were several systems for encoding selectric characters (e.g. tilt/rotate codes).) Meanwhile, there are numerous systems for dealing with mis-matched character set issues. It gets crazy. And I suspect there might be a reason people adopted full ASCII (with lower case) despite the too numerous alternatives. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 14:43, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
BTW: The first time I encountered such a computer, it was a [[wp:Prime Computer|Pr1me]] I remember trying being rather bamboozled about how to get the damned thing out of uppercase, including looking for a toggle under the keyboard. It took a little while to dawn on me that it could ''only'' '''do''' upper case. The [[wp:ZX80|ZX80]] code was also UPPERCASE, the ZX was so nice to program that the UPPERCASE restriction didn't seem to matter.
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