All good questions, just, again, not something I really believe anyone was planning for in 1970 or thereabouts. If so, the epoch would have gone longer, and don't get me started on null-terminated strings. Yeah, people can be smart in one area but not in another, but remember--there was no way to represent Arabic or anything else at that point, right? So "Oh, let's be case-sensitive just in case [no pun intended]" is risible.
Yes, Windows got it right, but they also don't allow duplicate names--I can't find a way to create E.txt and e.txt no matter how I try. So a *ix-head who believes in case sensitivity will see that as a fail, I assume. At least in an English Windows, I can create รจ.txt and e.txt as distinct files and command completion does not find them both. So that's a data point. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Friday, October 24, 2025 7:48 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IRXJCL oddity On Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:57:55 -0500, Jay Maynard <[email protected]> wrote: >I have this argument periodically with Eric Raymond. He swears up and >down that it matters in languages other than English, especially when >there are no single ways to translate upper to lower case or vice versa >as in some languages. Personally, I think case sensitivity is a botch, >because people just don't think they're different. Yeah, lots of alphabets don't have case. What do you do there? Arabic I think has four forms of each letter. (I may be waaaay wrong, but that is my recollection.) Do you treat all four as equivalent? Personally -- I know, heresy in this forum -- I like what Windows does: filename case is preserved on creation and displayed on listing but search is case-insensitive. So if I create a file called MyCamelCaseFileName then a directory list shows it that way but I can open it as mycamelcasefilename or MYCAMELCASEFILENAME or any other similar variant (including the original, of course). Kind of the best of both worlds IMHO. I have no idea what Windows does with alphabets without the concept of case. What do "tolerant" (non-case-sensitive) file systems do with accented letters? In French Windows, do you have to get the accents right when specifying a filename? In German Windows filenames, is u without an umlaut the same as u with an umlaut? What about ue? Charles ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
