Dan --

See below ...

At 2:50 AM -0400 8/13/01, Dan Moniz wrote:
>>--On Sunday, August 12, 2001 10:02 PM -0400 "Andrew C. Greenberg" 
>><werdna at mucow.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On Sunday, August 12, 2001, at 09:21 PM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>>>
>>>>It's a bit like Fortran.  Anyone who spells it "FORTRAN" these days
>>>>almost certainly hasn't bothered keeping up with the modern standards.
>>>
>>>I'll own up to ignorance on this.  When did FORTRAN become Fortran?
>>
>>See: http://www.fortran.com/fortran/FAQ/gene.html#1.1.0
>>
>
>[snip]
>
>>>  Is
>>>that a well-settled convention now?
>>
>>I think so. LISP is now Lisp. Hmm. Was Forth ever FORTH?
>>
>>>Has BASIC become Basic as well?
>>
>>I'd say so. There's an interesting bit further down the page in the FAQ:
>
>[snip]
>
>As an alternate explanation, I would argue that in the case of all 
>the languages mentioned, at the time of their creation, acronym or 
>no, all of them were originally spelled in uppercase if only due to 
>the lack of mixed case keyboards and keymaps.

Smalltalk was always spelled this way (because we had made our own 
bit-map displays and laserprinters and thus could make our own 
display and printing fonts.

Cheers,

Alan

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