On 21/11/2018 5:26 AM, Phil Smith III wrote:
The funny part about case sensitivity is that if you ask a *ix person why it’s
good, they almost universally assert that it is, but cannot come up with a
reason why, OR a case where you would deliberately mix two files or commands
with the same letters but different case (“CONFIG.txt” and “config.txt”, et
sim).
I’ve also always been surprised that no *ix implementation ever bit the bullet and tried to fix case sensitivity. Windows, of course, got it right; alas, given the historical antipathy *ix folks have for Windoze, I fear that’s all the more reason it will never get fixed…
I think one of the problems is the difficulty of implementing case
insensitivity in some other languages. English is straightforward with a
1:1 mapping between upper and lower case. I believe that is not the case
in all languages.
So then you have the problem that translating to upper case and
comparing can give a different answer to translating to lowercase and
comparing. To implement case insensitivity you need to actually define
how a case insensitive comparison should be done. Then, does that
definition need to cover all languages, or would you allow a compiler to
accept or reject a program based on locale? Or all programs must be
written in English?
At some point the easiest conclusion is that different is different,
which implies case sensitivity.
--
Andrew Rowley
Black Hill Software
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