On Wednesday 13 February 2013 16:17:28 Phil Smith wrote:
> R.S. wrote:
> > BTW: My argument against Unix behavior: I cannot distinguish MyFiLE and
> > MYfiLe during phone call. Even spelling is simpler for M-y-f-I-L-e than
> > for "Upper M - Upper Y...".
>
> Indeed. I'd put it more strongly: Case sensitivity for *IX filesystems
> offers NO benefit that anyone has ever been able to articulate to me. If
> you ask a *IX person, they act like it's just "obviously" A Good Thing, but
> can never express why. And if you ask them if they've ever created
> /something/abc and /something/Abc or any of the other possible values, they
> say "No".
>
> I think Windows got this one right. And a decade of asking for a
> counter-argument has failed to produce anything useful.
Not just Windows; my old AmigaOS machines, the TI99/4 and (I think)
Atari and
Apple machines all allowed creation of mixed-case names and treated them as
case-insensitive afterwards. It seems that only the *nix wannabes insist on
case-sensitive names.
The distinction is occasionally useful, mostly for files that are not
intended to be accessed directly by users.
>
> (Oddly, the one quasi-counter-argument is CMS, where you have to work at it
> to create/use a file with lowercase in the fileid-but that's a different
> kettle of hamsters, since it's more a byproduct of an historical mistake
> than a deliberate feature, and not the same at all as *IX.) --
Not so much a mistake as short-sightedness; before 3270s were
available,
keypunches could only do upper-case (without jumping through hoops), so
mixed-case names were probably considered unneccessary.
I also remember when, in CICS, one wanted to use mixed-case or
alternate
code-pages, additional reads of the data stream were required because CICS,
in its wisdom, folded everything to upper-case before presenting it to the
application.
Leslie
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