"Alain Williams" wrote in message
news:20170914133846.gq8...@phcomp.co.uk...
On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 02:16:47PM +0100, Tony Marston wrote:
A minor detail. Windows followed all the previous OSes which I had
used in being case insensitive, which makes unix the odd one out.
Besides there are far more computers running Windows than unix, so
unixx should not be used as the standard.
So you want a return to the horrors of code pages in file systems ?
I never said that.
Iike how you map lower -> upper depends on how you encode characters.
Then use a single UNICODE character set where every character has both an
upper and lower case representation. Problem solved.
Far better that that
problem is taken away from the file system (which should be clean, robust
and
fast) and if you want case independence put it up at the application layer.
You try telling that to the billions of Windows users who have been used to
a case insensitive file system for decades. Not to mention all Microsoft
software which is case insensitive. Try to take that away and billions of
users will be baying for your blood.
I vote for making it case sensitive: simpler for the parser; the programmer
rapidly learns that it should be 'TRUE' and not 'true' -- job done.
This is what Javascript does.
I don't give two hoots what javascript does.
Many operating systems were case insensitive since your input terminal (eg
AR33
Teletype) could only generate one case. But in those days it was simple
since
you only had one character set: ASCII or EBCDIC (translation of alphabetics
between the 2 was easy, some others not so, eg: @"\£#).
>But the additional problems that case-insensitive then
>introduces may mean that all case-insensitivity has to be removed at
>that point?
What additional problems? When billions of people are used to living
in a case-insensitive world and the only "problems" affect an
insignificantly small number in an insignificantly small number of
circumstances then the only proper solution is one that solves the
problem for the small number without messing it up for the far
larger number.
That is the sort of mind-set that results in browsers accepting all sort of
broken markup and making guesses on what is intended; different browsers
make
different guesses and render the page differently. The user then blames
browser
X for getting it wrong rather than the incompetent web developer who can't
be
bothered to check that their markup is correct.
UNICODE was supposedly invented to deal with all these problems so why
doesn't it? Why is it not possible to define an uppercase and lowercase
variant of the same character? If the problem lies with an incomplete
implementation of UNICODE then that is the problem which should be
addressed. Any programmer who says that he doesn't have the brain power to
provide a proper solution and proposes instead to remove case insensitivity
from the entire universe "because it is more convenient" should hang his
head in shame. It is the programmer's job to make things easier and more
convenient for the user, not for users to accept what is convenient for the
programmers to provide.
--
Tony Marston
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