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Message

Re: variable naming (or, much ado about nothing?)

2004-05-13 by grantrichter2001

> I. ALL CAPS
> Why are we using all caps? The language is not case 
sensitive. Just curious.

Basically, the same reason railroad tracks are the same width 
as Roman chariot wheels.

It started with the Victorian telegraph which had no lower case. 
The telegraph system was replaced with the Teletype system 
which had no lower case. The teletype machines were the 
orginal terminals for computers, so early computer programs 
were written without lower case.

(ASR-33 was a common model, here are a couple webpages:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/asr33.shtml
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/teletype.html
Note that a lot of Playboy centerfolds were scanned to make 
ASCII-porn and printed out on these machines, anybody who still 
has such a printout on original Teletype paper is the winner of 
the "Oldest Fhart" label.)

The standard "some" Olde Fharts use is to lower case 
'comments to seperate them from EXECUTABLE CODE.

What your end up with is upper case is IMPORTANT TO 
PROGRAM EXECUTION and lower case is "not as important to 
program execution".

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