On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 2:15 PM, zMan <[email protected]> wrote:
> Here's a fun experiment. Find your favorite *IX person. Ask them why > case-sensitivity is A Good Thing. Report back here. > > I have yet to find one who has any real reason other than "because". > > My guess, and that's all that it is, is that the original UNIX was case sensitive because it was written on a very slow computer. And the main terminal was a slow TTY, which defaulted to lower case characters. So, rather that waste the CPU doing a case insensitive search, or translating all non-literal characters to lower (or upper) case, the original designers said something like: "Hey! You people are supposed to be engineers. Learn to type in what you mean." That is, they offload the complicated stuff to the cheaper, at the time, human co-processors. UNIX was not really designed for "Joe Six Pack" and it shows. Which is why most people still like MS-Windows. Now, MacOSX has advanced to where it can be case sensitive or not, on a file system basis, as the user wants. OS/360 went the opposite way, to upper case, likely because the original peripherals were mainly upper case only. It's cheaper to design and build a mono-case device. At least it was in the past. Why is it still this way? The vaunted "backwards compatibility", aka "we've always done it that way!". What might be nice would be for some UNIX filesystem to be like MacOSX's which allows case sensitive or case insensitive but case preserving. And that would allow the end user to decide which they wanted. But the best answer that I found was "because UNIX has completed its sensitivity training while Windows remains insensitive." <grin/>. -- Wasn't there something about a PASCAL programmer knowing the value of everything and the Wirth of nothing? Maranatha! <>< John McKown
