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Can we fix the capitalization in the title? It's the programming language BASIC, which stands for Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
by martincmartin 6y ago
Can we fix the capitalization in the title? It's the programming language BASIC, which stands for Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
- new_here 6y agoSorry. HN makes some automatic adjustments to headlines when submitting and I didn’t notice it was decapitalized until I’d lost the ability to edit.
- jecel 6y agoFor the past few decades it has been common practice to treat language names as normal words independent of their origin. So FORTRAN, LISP, SNOBOL and BASIC have become Fortran, Lisp, Snobol and Basic. Unless the name doesn't look like a word, as in APL or PL/I. I am just guessing here, but in the really old days many computers only had capital letters and languages with names that were words ended up spelled as FORTH and PASCAL when they shouldn't have been. When lower case characters became common this was corrected and it could be that the acronym based language names came along for the ride. The only language name that really matters is Smalltalk. The name is actually used in expressions so if someone spells it as SmallTalk their program won't work.