From: casper@fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik)
Subject: Re: HP and windows NT
Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 08:49:10 GMT

hugh@rschp1.anu.edu.au (Hugh Fisher) writes:

>In article <1992Sep29.144643.16708@fwi.uva.nl>, casper@fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik) writes:

>   ...

>|> Maybe so. But I want it to preserve case, so that some files
>|> (README, Makefile) come first in an alfabetical list.
>|> Also, yous kilfully deleted my argument that there is no
>|> way that you can specify a case mapping that will satisfy all
>|> 8bit locales.

>   The Macintosh does just this, including 8 bit characters.
>   ...

Which is perfectly allright for a single user machine with a
single lcoale, it is not possible an a machine with a number of
users all of possible different nationalities who want to
exchange files. Try talking to scandinavians about this.

>   Real life, as opposed to the online existence of Usenet, is
>   NOT CASE SENSITIVE. If I send snail mail, or better yet, a
>   cheque, to "casper HS Dik" instead of "Casper HS Dik", are
>   you going to tell the post office that it isn't meant for you?
>   What would your reaction be if your bank refused to cash it
>   because the name is wrong?

Real life is case sensitive. There need only exist one case
where case sensitivity matters, those cases do exist as 
previously shown. QED.

>   I'd also like to point out that the Internet is not case
>   sensitive either: I can ping/mail/etc to FWI.UVA.NL and
>   get the same machine.

Which is also an artefact of the old computer days. Computers
represent enormous investments. It is no wonder that when computers
have to comunicate, the lowest common denominator is chosen. In
the case of names this boils down to a very limited character set.
Had the world started out with computers with a larger character set,
this would not have happened.

>   The Macintosh and the Internet do it right: 'we have case,
>   we allow case in names, and like real life we don't care
>   whether you use upper or lower case'

>|> The problem with not distinguishing between cases are twofold:
>|> 
>|> The system either talk back to you in monocase (so you can type
>|> in anycase but the system will list in monocase, usually uppercase,
>|> but hey, MS-DOS 5.0 now allows you to list in lower case, what a
>|> big step) or the system remembers case typed (Macintosh).

>|> In the first case, you'll have users complaining, I named the file ``Frank''
>|> but I now have a file called ``frank''.

>   Case sensitivity is worse. I waste far too much of my time telling
>   people 'no, you _have_ to login in as 'joe' - the computer is too
>   dumb to recognise 'Joe'. Ever tried to edit an X resource file?

It all depends on the background of your users. We have no
such problems.

>|> The only things on this earth that were not case-sensitive at
>|> some point in time(*) are old fashioned computers and their operating
>|> systems.

>   And modern computers, and their operating systems: VMS, MacOS,
>   OS/2 were all designed well after Unix.

You forget to mention DOS, also ``designed'' after Unix.

OS/2 mainly uses the DOS filesytem, VMS also has a strange limitation on
filenames. MacOS is the only OS that does something acceptable, but
as I tried to explain, it only works well on single user machines
until a generally accepted character set exists that contains all
the worlds characters. For now, I don't think that it is feasible to
do case mapping (on a per user basis) in the kernel.

Casper
-- 
						|	Casper H.S. Dik
						|	casper@fwi.uva.nl
Xref: sparky comp.sys.hp:11043 comp.emacs:3221