Hi John, John Gardner wrote on Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 07:25:00AM +1100: > Tadziu Hoffmann wrote:
>> or perhaps it was considered but consciously rejected because >> situations existed where it would be detrimental? > It could have been to make sections more conspicuous in text editors, Certainly not. The editor in v3 and v4 was ed(1). Even ex(1) did not exist at the time. > making it easier for the author to spot sections when skimming a file. > Doubt there was any syntax highlighting back then... =) Syntax highlighting six years before the invention of vi(1)? That's indeed a funny idea! > Plus it's easier to search for a section name The more(1) command first appeared in 3.0BSD. That is another year *after* vi(1). No, those can't possibly be the reasons. :-) I suspect that in 1973, developers consulted printed manuals rather than reading them at the terminal, simply because the terminal was a real line printing terminal and the machine didn't have a CRT yet. Even the first two machines i practiced programming on only had LED (not LCD!) single-line displays and didn't have CRTs yet. > if you know in advance it'll always be in uppercase, which I guess > spares you the effort of remembering to do a case-sensitive search > in vi or whatever... That may be worth considering today, though. How does the importance of that compare to the trouble caused for screen readers etc.? I tend to think it is not that important even today, so the main tradeoff remains (editing effort + overcoming people's inertia) vs. (less trouble for screen readers + nicer typography). Yours, Ingo
