"Levi Morrison" wrote in message
news:cafmt4nrc43y-nl_v85qt7jgv1ohm0y4kexhb4e3mi1ejhj0...@mail.gmail.com...
On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 2:59 AM, Tony Marston <tonymars...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
People who think that case sensitive software is cool are deluding
themselves. When I started working on mainframe computers (UNIVAC and
IBM)
in the early 1970s everything was case-insensitive. This was only changed
by
people who did not understand the ramifications of their choice.
Actually there are concrete bugs caused by case insensitivity. For one
example, here is our own bugs.ph p.net report about a Turkish locale
issue:
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=18556
The short summary of the issue is that when capital `I`, the ninth
letter of the English alphabet, is lowercased in the Turkish locales
it does not become the same `i` as it does in English but a different
i that is not considered equal. Thus classes such as `Iterator` are
not found in the Turkish locales. Note that this bug was fixed, and
then there was a regression that lasted until PHP 5.5.
There are other case insensitivity bugs but this Turkish one is the
poster child and if you search around you can find many examples of
it.
Case sensitivity is thus *a correctness issue* and not a "cool"ness,
personal preference, performance, or some other type of issue. I argue
correctness and maintenance issues are the most important and thus if
we change sensitivity of *any* type of symbol it should go in the
direction of being case sensitive. Someone can disagree on what they
value but people who think case insensitivity is not a correctness
issue "are deluding themselves".
Levi Morrison
I'm sorry, but errors in translation from one character set to another are
insignificant when compared with the much larger problem of the same word
having diferent meanings depending on case. In the English language "info"
is the same as "Info" is the same as "INFO" is the same as "iNFO" is the
same as "iNfO" and so on. If the problem is that an English word cannot be
recognised as the same word regardless of case when switching to a
non-English character set then the issue is with switching to a non-English
character set.
Introducing case sensitivity just for this minor bug would create more
issues than it would solve, so this bug should be solved using a different
technique .
--
Tony Marston
--
PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
