Hi Murray,

On 14-Sep-99, Murray Lesser wrote to Leonard Erickson:


 ML> LE>Also, that uppercase/lower case distinction being on bit was
 ML> LE>important for programmers writing *tight* code. I used to use
 ML> LE>that single bit trick in programs back when 16k or DRAM cost
 ML> LE>several hundred dollars.

 ML> I wouldn't know.  My first "ASCII" computer was a fully-populated
 ML> CP/M machine (64K RAM), vintage 1979.  All my previous programming
 ML> experience was on either 6-bit or 8-bit machines, none of which
 ML> used any version of ASCII.  AFAIAC, the convenience of one-bit
 ML> differentiation between upper- and lower-case characters doesn't
 ML> make up for the inconvenience of dealing with the stupid ASCII
.....................^^^^^^^^^^^^^.....................^^^^^^

You _are_ being polite about it! I use _much_ stronger terms!!!

 ML> collating sequence (that interspersed the special characters
 ML> within the alphabetic characters.)

However the convenience of the single bit difference between upper and
lower case does exist, and I find the control characters between the
numeric and alphabetic parts of the ASCII sequence even more
irritating than the ones between the upper and lower case alphabetic
characters (after all I can always force the alphabetic characters to
upper case, for almost all collation I have had to implement that is
sufficient).




George

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