On Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:45:52 GMT, Martin Buchholz <mar...@openjdk.org> wrote:
>> 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. > Do you have an opinion on the appropriate level of documentation / comments > for this kind of 'tricky' code? This code is not that tricky! And the proposed level of documentation is excessive! A couple of lines of explanation and perhaps a link to an external document would be good. It often happens to me that I will write such exhaustive notes for myself when learning a new technology. A year later I pare it all back because much of it is "obvious in retrospect". ------------- PR: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/12632
