I'm not convinced that case sensitivity was a mistake. On other characteristics of Eunix, I agree. Take 0-delimited strings and the C conflation of arrays and pointers - please.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Phil Smith III <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2018 1:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: So much for THAT excuse | Computerworld SHARK TANK The whole ASCII-EBCDIC thing certainly has been a huge cost—probably, as Gil suggests, as large as the other two combined. But I’d argue that it wasn’t necessarily either EBCDIC or ASCII’s fault, just that they evolved in parallel and neither truly “won” [insert another debate about what “winning” would mean here: clearly in terms of number of systems and raw horsepower, ASCII won; in terms of business criticality, z holds its own, or it would presumably no longer exist]. The NTS thing always struck me as hopelessly naïve, and case sensitivity as some combination of naïveté and laziness. I understand that PDP horsepower was quite low, and so both of these made sense at the time. That doesn’t make them good or smart design decisions. Of course it’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback this. 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… ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
