From: casper@fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik)
Subject: Re: HP and windows NT
Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 09:05:17 GMT

jinx@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Guillermo J. Rozas) writes:

>In article <Buy6FD.C4M@cup.hp.com> wk@cup.hp.com (Wayne Krone) writes:

>|   : How would the choice hurt you?  It's not like by supporting NT in
>|   : addition to Unix HP would stop Unix support (at least immediately).
>|   : 
>|   : Also, ultimately, shouldn't the choice of OS be your users' choice,
>|   : not yours?
>|
>|   You're willing to give users a choice of OS but don't trust them to
>|   properly use another 26 (American count) characters for their filenames?

>Two answers to this:

>- People are trained from age 2 onwards (when they learn to read) not
>to distinguish case.  On cursory inspection, most people don't, thus
>it is a misfeature to use to names (whether they are file names or
>variable names or procedure names) that differ only in case, since
>people have to pay very careful attention (which they are not trained
>to do) to notice the difference.  This has bitten me many times.

I don't buy this. You use capitals when typing and capitals at
the beginning of sentences enhance the readability.
Capitals alter the meaning of some words. (god vs God, Frank vs frank,
roger vs Roger and many more)

>- Some standard Unix utilities exploit case differences.  Make does.
>Sorry, "make" does.  I would not mind a file system in which files
>remembered the case in which they were introduced (so that people
>could get them to print whichever way they wanted), but which used
>case-insensitive comparison.

This is my main problem with case insensitive filesystems. I've
used a number of them (DOS, VMS, AOS/VS and Macintosh). The only
implementation that remembered case is the Mac implementation.
The other implementations accept any case you type but when you
list the files THE SYSTEM SHOUTS THE NAMES BACK AT YOU. That is
not acceptable. (See how uppercase reads differently from lowercase)

>If people really want case-sensitive file systems, let them have it.
>I would not use them myself.  Where is the choice (in the Unix world)
>now?

How can you implement case sensitivity on top of a case insensitive
filesystem? You have a choice in the names you use. Programs like
make can warn the user when both File and file exist. Sun make does.

I think that one of the definite plusses of Unix is the case dependent
filesystem. Besides, what is case? There are a number of 8bit character
sets out there, filenames can contain 8 bit characters and I'm
pretty sure that there is at least one character that hasn't got the
same lower case representation in all sets.

E.g., in Duch there's a ij-ligature called ``long y'' (as opposed
to the ei-ligature of the same pronunciation, called ``short y'',
pronounced as ``y'' withut the w.). The lowercase form is one
8bit character (octal 377 in iso 8859.1). The uppercase version is
IJ. Now, when a user types ``ABCDEFGHIJ'' as a file names is this the
same as ``abcdefgh\377'' or the same as ``abcdefghij''??

I don't think I want to burden the kernel with that.

Casper
-- 
						|	Casper H.S. Dik
						|	casper@fwi.uva.nl
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp