in reply to Do ORA's Perl logos contribute to common misspelling?

I think another reason is the old-fashioned tendency to write the names of all programming languages (and even programs) in all caps. I've seen FORTRAN, LISP, BASIC, PASCAL, PERL, COBOL, ADA, JAVA, PHP, etc. This might be because very old computers worked that way, or because many of these names really are abbreviations, but now most of these languages are more commonly writen in lowercase (or capitalizing the first letter only).
  • Comment on Re: Do ORA's Perl logos contribute to common misspelling?

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Re^2: Do ORA's Perl logos contribute to common misspelling?
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 06, 2004 at 11:01 UTC
    Yeah, it took me years to get used to not writing C in all caps anymore, but only in leading uppercase.
Re^2: Do ORA's Perl logos contribute to common misspelling?
by CountZero (Bishop) on Oct 06, 2004 at 19:06 UTC
    Back in the days when computers were fed punched cards, I don't think there was a difference between upper- and lowercase.

    CountZero

    "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

      Yeah, as I recall, the old teletypes only had uppercase.

      I don't know if it's true, but the story I heard years later was that they could only use upper or lower case, for whatever reason. The engineers wanted to use lower because it's easier to read. The president, (or somebody with the final say) said if there's a choice, it has to be upper; otherwise "GOD" could not be spelled with a capital G.

      Kind of sounds like a myth, but still a good story :)

      TheEnigma

        I've heard this same story, but in the context of telegraph machines, not computers. I would assume the conventions of telegraphs had some persuasion over computers, though.