At 09:45 AM 10/18/2006 -0400, Hal Kaplan wrote:
...
The only reason that case-sensitivity is an issue is because the first
computers had limited storage. Full-font alphabets were a luxury, as were
unambiguous dates. Now that we have the bandwidth to indulge in mirroring
actual human written communication, we should take advantage of it. No?
No (more on that below). For mainframes, I believe you are right in
assuming that storage was a premium. But I believe even back then they had
a 128 character alphabet. So upper/lower text was available. I just think
on mainframes, they took the extra effort to 'ignore' case in the file
system. When Unix came along, I think they were 'lazy' and did not make the
file system (or code compilers) case-insensitive.
No? Well then please be consistent. Do not use upper AND lower case in
your writing and your posts here. Start a trend!
...
There are extremely important differences in the two environments. Humans
read with more efficiency when proper capitalization is used. Computers do
not read like humans. And, in concept, the purpose of computers is to try
and remove mundane things so humans don't have to deal with it.
Another way to look at it is capitalization can change meaning in a
human-readable document (especially in legal documents). In terms of
computer systems, trying to mimic that same behavior is counter-intuitive.
In other words, why would you want a file named TestJunk.txt to be
different than TESTJUNK.txt? Why would you want a variable "notgood" to be
different than "NOTGOOD"? The compiler should equate 'NOTGOOD' and
'notgood' as the same variable. Note that I said compiler not IDE. Again,
developers are human (most of 'em) so they read text more efficiently with
mixed case (assuming it's used somewhat logically).
Maybe we're not talking from the same point of view. I say the 'file
system' should allow the case of the filename to be preserved when created.
Just like source code should preserve the case in which it was created.
However, for any file-system function, case should be ignored (so that
<open-file> "testdoc.txt" would be able to open "TestDoc.TxT"). And
compilers should be able perform it's functions and match variables in the
symbol table regardless of the case in which they were referenced. Doing
things this way would save countless hours of tracing/fixing problems. Note
I am not talking about "pure data". Data is data - it shouldn't be touched
by the OS/compiler. And that's why the various DBs have functions to allow
developers to code in case-ignoring data handing (or vice versa).
Computers do not act like humans and vice versa. Each should try to
'optimize' what it does best. Ignoring case in file systems functions and
compilers is one thing the computer should handle for us.
-Charlie
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