On Mon, 24 Feb 2014 14:44:36 -0600, John McKown wrote: >On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 2:15 PM, zMan wrote: > >> Here's a fun experiment. Find your favorite *IX person. Ask them why >> case-sensitivity is A Good Thing. >> >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."
I don't believe that it was anywhere near that conscious a decision. I attribute it to laziness on the part of the small team that created Unix. Unix and C were both designed to be easy to implement, not to be easy to use. AFAIK, the people who wrote Unix did it for themselves, not as an operating system for everyone. -- Tom Marchant
