On 2025-08-26 13:55 PM, Phil Smith III wrote:
Humans are not particularly case-sensitive; computers shouldn't be
either. I contend that anyone who would create files foo Foo and FOO
(and the other variants) is just asking for trouble, and will surely
find it. Same with options: -r and -R on the same command, with
different meanings, is insane. My understanding is that the
single-character tendency is an architectural artifact of the PDP
machines, which lacked a CLC equivalent. That doesn't make that good, or
something that needs to persist forever. Of course old command formats
need to be supported, but adding -recurse and -replace (or whatever
-r/-R mean on a given command) is well worth doing for usability.
Multiple items in a program differing only in case are indeed a recipe
for errors.
Linux, for years, has been migrating to a longer form of shell command
options, e.g.,
du --human-readable --max-depth=1 bin
but for downward compatibility they also support the old ones, e.g.,
du -h -d 1 bin
Of course, my example du is one of the commands with different old
format options that differ only in case:
-H equivalent to --dereference-args (-D)
-h, --human-readable
print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
My personal pet peeve is files where the non-comment content *must* be
in upper case, but the IBM samples are provided with mixed case
comments. Hello, JES2 initialization members.
--
Regards, Gord Tomlin
