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I was wondering why every message, letter, etc. in Ender's game has no lowercase letters. Is it just because it was written in the 80's or is there a better reason?

SQB
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  • Shortens the message in any event - you only need 8 bits as opposed to 16 or 32 – Affable Geek Oct 18 '13 at 15:15
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    @AffableGeek - Only if you're using hexadecimal. 8 bits is sufficient for the entire basic ASCII table (256 characters). This includes A-Z, a-z, 0-9, punctuation, some monetary/language symbols and control characters (Such as ASCII codes 10 and 13 which are line feed and carriage return). – JohnP Oct 18 '13 at 16:18
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    Upper case letters don't have any dangly bits that descend below the line, whereas lower case letters (j, g, y etc) descend below the line. If you want to be efficient, you just stick to the upper case letters. The descenders in lower case letters look ugly, and hard to read, in simple text systems where the letter needs to get printed all above the line. – Lucien Stals Jan 12 '16 at 21:43
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    It was written by the fathers of today's YouTube trolls. –  Jan 12 '16 at 22:07
  • This would permit six-bit encoding. Perhaps bandwidth is precious. Perhaps not. – Joshua Apr 20 '17 at 18:19

2 Answers2

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It has been the habit to send naval messages in all caps. It is just 2013 that US has began the process to stop this.

US Navy ends dependence on capitalised communications

At press time it was estimated it be 2015 before the change could be fully tested.

James Jenkins
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    Early teletypes only had uppercase (1850's), so it was common to represent official messages in all capitals. – JohnP Oct 18 '13 at 16:20
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    THATISCORRECTSTOPMORSECODEONLYHADSYMBOLSFORLETTERSANDNUMBERSSTOPTHISALLOWEDFORASINGLESTREAMOFINFORMATIONTHATONLYWOULDMAKESENSEINCONTEXTSTOPANDIFYOUHADNOTGUESSEDTHEYALSOHADNOPUNCTUATIONSTOP – Vogie Jan 12 '16 at 23:28
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Out-of-universe answer

It's just a formatting thing. A way for the reader to distinguish them from the rest of the text.

In the original 1985 edition they were also in a larger typeface than the rest of the text, this was changed in the 1991 revised edition to be just caps. See How does the 1991 edition of Ender's Game differ from the 1985 edition?.

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