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Chris Garrigues wrote:
|>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Larry Jones) |>Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 11:49:29 -0500 (EST) |> |>Chris Garrigues writes: |> |>>Yes, "Therapist" and "TheRapist" do convey different ideas. However, in |> |>an |> |>>actual English sentence, it's pretty damned clear what "I'M GOING TO SEE |> |>MY |> |>>THERAPIST THIS AFTERNOON." means even without mixed case to clue you in. |> |>Yes, case is less important when you have additional context like an |>entire sentence. The problem is that in most computer applications, we |>don't have any contxt to allow us to distinguish one thing from |>another, so case becomes more important. You may have noticed that I |>misspelled "context" in the previous sentence, or maybe not. In either |>event, I'm sure you had no trouble understanding what I meant. Are you |>now going to claim that English isn't spelling sensitive, either? | | |Careful now or you might end up making my point for me. | |The fact is that I didn't even notice that "context" was misspelled and I did |understand the sentence completely. Given that human beings care and do |understand things which are misspelled and which have differing case, it |should be obvious that from a human interaction perspective, it would be ideal |if the computer could also understand things which are misspelled and have |differing case. Understanding misspelled words is a difficult task and is |well beyond the scope of this email, but whether or not a computer language |or operating system or software package is case sensitive or not is a |design decision and IMHO, from the perspective of usability, Unix (and C) made |the wrong call. | |However, after over 30 years, this is not a decision which is going to be |changed, so I just grumble about it in email every few years and go on with |my life. | |Chris
The salient point to me is that _sometimes_ case does make a difference and a case insensitive filesystem can take that choice away from the user in some circumstances.
Now, a filesystem, or perhaps something akin to bash's tab-completion that would make sense of misspelled and miscased words, when it seemed best, and would still allow words with conflicting case when requested, might make sense, but I don't think CVS has any business fiddling around at this level. If a SysAdmin thinks it important that the CVS server look case insensitive, that admin can install the repository in question on a case insensitive file system.
Derek
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Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Get CVS support at <http://ximbiot.com>! - -- I am not a dentist. I am not a dentist. I am not a dentist...
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