On Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:10:54 -0500, John Gilmore wrote: > >Things were different in other, non-IBM cultures. > >I remember, for example, being struck many, many years ago by the fact >that the MULTICS source programs I saw at MIT, mostly PL/I and a very >little assembler, were being written all but entirely in lower case. > I had a similar epiphany about 8 lustra ago when we switched from a Teletype 33 we had been using for timesharing on a decsystem 10 to a TI thermal printer/keyboard, largely to upgrade from 10 cps to 30. I noticed that the system reports, such as headings on directory listings were in mixed case, albeit an Orator-like typeface with the minuscules merely foreshortened majuscules. "Wow! It speaks my language!"
But case-insensitivity is chauvinistic, at least as Windows 7 implements it. While Win 7 balked when I tried to create Cat and CAT in the same directory, it cheerfully let me create both матрёшка and МАТРЁШКА. So, whether you enjoy the benefits or bear the burden (as some see it) of case-sensitivity depends on whether your modal alphabet is Latin or Cyrillic. It's so unfair! Someone ought to complain. Or is there perhaps a Russian localization of Windows which makes Cyrillic filenames case-insensitive and Latin case-sensitive? (But think of the consequences for portability!) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
