I don't happen to know of any language whose orthography has complex upper-lower case correlations, but it's an intriguing idea. Meanwhile--aside from making students miserable with arcane spelling rules--case manipulation seems more useful for obscuring passwords than for any technical transparency.
Unix, IMO, makes ridiculous use of case. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andrew Rowley Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2018 2:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: (External):Re: So much for THAT excuse | Computerworld SHARK TANK On 21/11/2018 5:26 AM, Phil Smith III wrote: > The funny part about case sensitivity is that if you ask a *ix person why > it’s good, they almost universally assert that it is, but cannot come up with > a reason why, OR a case where you would deliberately mix two files or > commands with the same letters but different case (“CONFIG.txt” and > “config.txt”, et sim). > > I’ve also always been surprised that no *ix implementation ever bit > the bullet and tried to fix case sensitivity. Windows, of course, got > it right; alas, given the historical antipathy *ix folks have for > Windoze, I fear that’s all the more reason it will never get fixed… > I think one of the problems is the difficulty of implementing case insensitivity in some other languages. English is straightforward with a 1:1 mapping between upper and lower case. I believe that is not the case in all languages. So then you have the problem that translating to upper case and comparing can give a different answer to translating to lowercase and comparing. To implement case insensitivity you need to actually define how a case insensitive comparison should be done. Then, does that definition need to cover all languages, or would you allow a compiler to accept or reject a program based on locale? Or all programs must be written in English? At some point the easiest conclusion is that different is different, which implies case sensitivity. -- Andrew Rowley Black Hill Software ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
