Re: [open-cobol-list] Upper lower case and free format.

[Dave Stratford]

John Culleton wrote:
> 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.

Cobol 74 at least is capable of coping with lowercase in value clauses and
string literals.

Dave

-- 
Dave Stratford
Hexagon Systems Limited                             Experts in VME systems