On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 10:36:02AM +0100, Tony Marston wrote:

> we began to read and write. I have been working in the computer
> industry since the early 1970s on a variety of mainframe, mini- and
> micro-computers, and a variety of languages. and this was all case
> insensitive. It was only the invention of unix which threw a spanner
> in the works.

I remember those early days; things have changed. Back then case was not an 
issue:

* ASR33 Teletypes were upper case only

* Punch cards machines were upper case only

Yes: you could sometimes get lower case, but it was hard.

Case conversion was easy:

* ASCII - 7 bit characters, easy

* EBCDIC - 8 bit characters, easy

(OK: national variants of ASCII/EBCDIC, but still 7/8 bit).

Some machines, eg CDC, had 6 bit character set - upper case only.

These days we use Unicode, a 21 bit character set. Case conversion is hard and,
as others have explained, can be ambiguous, non-reversible, ...

> If you wish to enforce case sensitivity in projects which you
> control then go ahead. Just don't try to enforce it on everybody
> else.

May I suggest that you create your own fork of PHP and leave the rest of us 
alone.

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT 
Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: 
http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
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