On 24/09/17 11:05, Alain Williams wrote: >> we began to read and write. I have been working in the computer >> industry since the early 1970s on a variety of mainframe, mini- and >> micro-computers, and a variety of languages. and this was all case >> insensitive. It was only the invention of unix which threw a spanner >> in the works. > I remember those early days; things have changed. Back then case was not an > issue: > > * ASR33 Teletypes were upper case only > > * Punch cards machines were upper case only > > Yes: you could sometimes get lower case, but it was hard. > > Case conversion was easy: > > * ASCII - 7 bit characters, easy > > * EBCDIC - 8 bit characters, easy > > (OK: national variants of ASCII/EBCDIC, but still 7/8 bit). > > Some machines, eg CDC, had 6 bit character set - upper case only. > > These days we use Unicode, a 21 bit character set. Case conversion is hard > and, > as others have explained, can be ambiguous, non-reversible, ...
That sums it up nicely Alain ... Now the question is actually ... do we stay in the dark ages of single byte character sets or do we move to fully embrace a current well established and extensively used standard. Unicode has perhaps shirked on the matter of 'case-insensitive' so there is no clean solution to that today. That should not prevent the switch to unicode and other threads such as the csv routines are now highlighting additional 'edge cases' where unicode needs addressing, or kicking into the long grass of extensions of mbstring? Maintaining 'case-insensitive' for single byte character sets is an option, but then one needs to stay with that for the whole code functionality? Allowing multibyte constant names with the current limited sub-set of case conversion is just not sensible, but in the absence of a clean unicode case folding/conversion which is the sensible next step? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
