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Re: [open-cobol-list] Upper lower case and free format.
From: |
John Culleton |
Subject: |
Re: [open-cobol-list] Upper lower case and free format. |
Date: |
Mon, 7 Feb 2011 12:40:33 -0500 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.11.4 (Linux/2.6.29.6-smp; KDE/4.2.4; i686; ; ) |
On Monday 07 February 2011 09:19:00 Fred Mobach wrote:
> On Monday 07 February 2011 00:34:37 John Culleton wrote:
> > If punch cards had lower case I suspect Grace Hopper would have
> > used U/L when she first designed the language in 1960 or so. But
> > not only punchcards but the interior character set of many 2nd
> > generation computers could not handle lower case. I had charge of
> > a Honeywell system (H110) that did not have lower case in
> > 1970-1971.
>
> Since 1970 I've used punch cards with EBCDIC based computers.
> Sometimes the printers were desinged to print lowercase letters,
> more often not.
>
> However, especially in PICTURE strings lowercase letters were used
> like a -> x'81' (punch 12-0-1 ?).
COBOL was invented circa 1959 or so and was first developed in a world
where 6 bits were allowed for a character. As you state printers most
often had only upper case. and key punches used BCDIC encoding which
descended from the Hollerith code and only had keys for upper case.
12-0-1 in a Hollerith card would require overpunching. The standard
Hollerith encoding had only two holes per column. Morse code had only
upper case. And so on.
Many of the computers used paper tape instead of punch cards for data
input. The teletype and similar keyboards again had only upper case
letters in standard encoding. Remember the telegram? It didn't even
have punctuation.
EBCDIC came some years later. But upper and lower case for COBOL code
came with COBOL 85. COBOL 68 and 74 were upper case only.
John Culleton
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