On 4 October 2013 19:29, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote: > Many operating systems nowadays welcome files named in the > UTF-8 character set (notable exceptions are z/OS and z/VM). > OS X will let me name files in the Finder GUI in Greek, Hebrew, > Cyrillic, ... But the GUI complains and prohibits names that > are not valid UTF-8. (I can sneak around and assign such names > in Terminal line commands.)
If, as Charles asks, you are talking about invalid (malformed) UTF-8, then that's akin to the discussion on DSNAMEs in JCL, and in the VTOC and catalog[ue]. The OS should make clear the domain of filenames, and enforce it. It's certainly a UNIXy thing to accept almost any binary values, and leave the end user to deal with the results. It's also reasonable to provide a lower level interface that skips the validity check, but there may be security/integrity concerns. > But this raises a question for the case-insensitive partisans > (Windows bigots, IOW): Should the OS or filesystem treat > files named "ÿ" and "Ÿ" as equivalent; allow either to be > referred to by the other name, and prohibit the occurrence > of both in a single directory? It's unsatisfactory to suggest > that it should depend on one's locale settings; it's parochial to > suggest that the Roman alphabet should be case-insensitive > but the Cyrillic case-sensitive. I don't know. I'm not a Windows bigot by any stretch, but I do like case-insensitive but case-preserving behaviour in file and variable names, and similar things. Easy for me to say; I'm an anglophone, and the alphabets I know have easy and language-independent casing rules. But it's subtle; many characters don't have an upper/lower case version, because they're not alphabetic or because many alphabets (Hebrew/Arabic/Korean...) have no concept of case, sometimes there are complex casing rules, and sometimes there's a fairly free choice. Should a case-insensitive file system treat spaß.txt and SPASS.TXT as the same? What about spaß.txt vs spass.txt? And as you say, it's unsatisfactory to make that last one work differently in German than other languages. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
