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From: zben@ni.umd.edu (Ben Cranston)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Colour Highlighting
Summary: Blame Jim Backus for "hilite"
Message-ID: <1991Jun28.200038.29905@ni.umd.edu>
Date: 28 Jun 91 20:00:38 GMT
References: <1991Jun27.125004.19449@runx.oz.au> <1991Jun28.174637.7902@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
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In article <1991Jun27.125004.19449@runx.oz.au>
karlg@runx.oz.au (Karl Goiser) writes:

> the world are forced to program using the words color and hilite.  And if
> this isn't bad enough, we've now got to put up with Behaviors in MacApp 3!!!

In article <1991Jun28.174637.7902@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) writes:

> Color and behavior you can blame on us Yanks (though you're perfectly welcome
> to use some other nationality of computer if you don't like them :-)), but
> "hilite" is no more proper Over Here than Over There.

I think you can blame Jim Backus (head of team that developed Fortran in the
1950s) for our tendancy to shorten names to 6 characters.  The language was
developed for an IBM 7094 computer that stored 6 6-bit characters in each of
its 36 bit words...