John Chambers wrote: > Yeah, but you could argue that it's not as big a problem with > Windows, because Windows (and MSDOS) is a separate OS that is its own > "standard" and has never been even minimally compatible with any > other system. People expect that porting software to Windows will be > a big deal, and will require a lot of rewriting. > > OSX is, however, a variant of unix. Much unix software runs on it > without problems. They even seem to have fixed most of the problems > with the aberrant CR line terminators, and switched over to the > standard LF terminators. And OSX is pushed as a member of the unix > family of systems. So you start using it, and discover this one > really nasty little gotcha ...
Actually, back in 1982 when I first learned UNIX (actually Idris, the first commercial UNIX lookalike...), it was pounded into me that one should never take the case-dependence of the file system for granted, since there were *already* case-independent file systems out there that could be accessed with the right drivers. (Admittedly, those file systems were mostly on *floppy* disks, but the basic concept is still the same... ;) This was reinforced on the C side of things (which I was learning at the same time), because assuming case dependencies in filenames were considered non-portable in any case. (And back then, writing portable code was considered by us to be even more important than today...) Yes, the case independence of HFS+ (the default Mac OS X filesystem) is an issue if you got in the habit of naming two files the same except for case, but, IMHO, that has ALWAYS been a bad UNIX practice. If you never got into that habit, you shouldn't run into any problems on the Mac. -->Steve Bennett To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
