On Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:06:51 GMT, David Holmes <dhol...@openjdk.org> wrote:
>> Thanks Martin, I will from now on envision a stack of dusty punch cards with >> carefully scribbled notes on the back, barely held together with a dry and >> cracked rubber band. >> >> More to the point: Do you have an opinion on the appropriate level of >> documentation / comments for this kind of 'tricky' code? My goal is that >> future maintainers should not get scared by the code and help them >> understand why it became what it is. > > There are still some books on this :) but from wikipedia: >> during May 1963 the CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet >> proposed to assign lowercase characters to >> sticks[[a]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-NB_Stick-15)[[14]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-Bemer_1980_Inside-14) >> 6 and 7,[[15]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-CCITT_1963-16) >> and [International Organization for >> Standardization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization) >> TC 97 SC 2 voted during October to incorporate the change into its draft >> standard.[[16]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-ISO_1963-17) >> The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May >> 1963 meeting.[[17]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-18) >> **Locating the lowercase letters in >> sticks[[a]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-NB_Stick-15)[[14]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#cite_note-Bemer_1980_Inside-14) >> 6 and 7 caused the characters to differ in bit pattern from the upper case by a single bit, which simplified [case-insensitive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-insensitive) character matching and the construction of keyboards and printers.** > > Hence the simplicity of the shift key :) More history: IIRC I originally used 'ASCII trick' when I was truly only cared about ASCII, not Latin1 (e.g. ZipFile.isMetaName) and it's a slight misnomer to use "ASCII" here. But Latin1 followed the precedent of ASCII. ------------- PR: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/12632
