On Mon, 14 May 2018 16:50:41 -0400, Phil Smith III wrote:
>The funny part is, find the most rabid Unix-head you know, and ask why it's
>A Good Thing that filenames are case-sensitive. In my reasonably extensive
>experience at playing this game (including 5 years at Linuxcare, with lots
>of victims), several things were always true:
>
>1) They would assert vehemently that it was A Good Thing
>
>2) They could not articulate why
>
OK. I'll try. Simplicity of specification. Simplicity of implementation.
Filenames are strings. Different strings should refer to different files.
Consistency. With Binder it's easy enough to create a load module:
CASE(M)
....
NAME FooBar(R)
Should //STEP EXEC PGM=FOOBAR invoke that program? Why not"
How about //STEP EXEC PGM='FooBar'? Why not? How about
TSO: EXEC *(FooBar)?
Would you submit or vote for an RFE that LOAD/LINK/ATTACH, BLDL, ...
be made case-insensitive?
Why not? I suspect you supplied the answer:
>So it fits the definition of "tradition": The same stupid old way we've
>always done it!
>
"Stupid" indeed. And z/OS is worse than most for inconsistency. Some
interfaces are case-sensitive; others enforce case-insensitivity.
And ethnic diversity. Should files named in Cyrillic, Greek, ... be treated
in a case-insensitive fashion? Imagine the implementation complexity
and documentation complexity. Should it be locale-sensitive? Should
Cyrillic filenames be case-insensitive in the Russia locale and Latin
filenames be case sensitive? And vice-versa in a Latin locale?
Suppose another language is newly added to the Unicode CECP. Should
characters previously considered distinct suddenly be considered equivalent
because they are upper-lower case pairs?
(Don't be Anglocentric in your answer.)
Others have argued here that the filesystem should ignore diacritical marks.
But a Hispanophone sees "año" and "ano" as two very different nouns and
would probably not approve of using them interchangably as a filename.
Peter Relson, among others, has written here of "invalid" names, implying
GIGO. I disagree with quiet GIGO -- a programmer should be provided at
least a warning message on use of an "invalid" construct.
-- gil
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