>>It occurs to me that if COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, it might more properly be capitalized "CoBOL". But nobody ever does. Come to think of it, why do we capitalize "FoxPro" the way we do?
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>Hi Bret,
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>I'd assume that the reason it's COBOL and not CoBOL is the same as the reason why it's FORTRAN (Formula Translation) and not ForTran (whatever that is< g>). Seriously, I think it was just an adopted convention to always capitalize all letters in an acronym. The languages Pascal and Modula 2 aren't acronyms, BASIC is (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Which brings about the following answer to your FoxPro question...
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>FoxPro is a marketing name, just like Visual Basic. VB's language is BASIC, but its name is Basic. (After reading what I've just written I have a feeling it's gonna be one of *those* weeks < s >)

That all makes sense.

I have seen capitalization of the sort I described. The Federal Highway Administration can't be called the FHA, because that is the Federal Housing Administration. I have seen its acronym spelled both FHWA and FHwA.