On 2014-02-25, at 07:41, John Gilmore wrote:
> There is an old mathematical/engineering tradition of distinguishing
> the meanings of the minuscules and majuscules of the same alphabetic
> letter.
>
> ...
> What is appropriate is thus contextual and thus also problematic. We
> programmers are a motley crew. Each of us is a creature of his/her
> own specific experience; and no convention is likely to be congenial
> to all of us.
>
Hmmm... Imagine a language in which each identifier could be
declared as either case-sensitive of case-insensitive. A programmer
might declare "T" and "t" case-sensitive, and "Yes" and "no"
case insensitive. While such a facility might narrow the scope of
the dispute, it might aggravate its intensity.
Similarly in the OS for filenames Interesting. Windows applications
mostly treat even Cyrillic UTF-8 as case-insensitive, even with Registry
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel\obcaseinsensitive
= 0.
Cyrillic? All languages I'm familiar with use USASCII. Parochial?
Of course. I've heard of languages with Cyrillic, even Chinese
biases. It would be easy enough simply to treat all UTF-8
non-USASCII characters as alphabetic, however parochial.
Diacritical marks? Some might argue that they, like case, should
be ignored. However a Spanish programmer might explain to you why
you should never omit or ignore the tilde in "año" ("year").
-- gil
