On Fri, 4 Oct 2013 17:19:44 -0400, Tony Harminc wrote: > >To say nothing of y+diaeresis U+00FF, which carries the strange >baggage of having its lower case version ÿ in ISO 8859-1 (and CP 037, >1047, and so on), but finding its upper case version Ÿ languishing in >the higher reaches of the Unicode BMP at U+0178. > Many operating systems nowadays welcome files named in the UTF-8 character set (notable exceptions are z/OS and z/VM). OS X will let me name files in the Finder GUI in Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, ... But the GUI complains and prohibits names that are not valid UTF-8. (I can sneak around and assign such names in Terminal line commands.)
But this raises a question for the case-insensitive partisans (Windows bigots, IOW): Should the OS or filesystem treat files named "ÿ" and "Ÿ" as equivalent; allow either to be referred to by the other name, and prohibit the occurrence of both in a single directory? It's unsatisfactory to suggest that it should depend on one's locale settings; it's parochial to suggest that the Roman alphabet should be case-insensitive but the Cyrillic case-sensitive. Similar concerns apply to diacritics; they can drastically alter semantics. The Spanish word for "year" is "año". It's important not to neglect the tilde; you get a very different word. (Are there similar examples in other languages?) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
