Case sensitive file names
Guest Moderator, John B. Chambers
std-unix at ut-sally.UUCP
Sat Nov 22 07:08:45 AEST 1986
>From uw-beaver!uw-vlsi!mprvaxa!ubc-vision!utai!utcsri!mcgill-vision!mouse at nike.UUCP Wed Nov 19 04:57:50 1986
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 86 02:46:16 EST
From: der Mouse <uw-beaver!ubc-vision!mcgill-vision!mouse at nike.UUCP>
> Please, if you support case-dependence, don't give the "mixed case
> filesystems" class of arguments. The only two arguments you really
> have are (1) it is a "feature" (however dubious) that you can create
> Makefile and makefile as separate files in the same directory, and
> (2) Unix does it this way.
I think everyone arguing over case sensitivity is missing something.
Why treat letters specially? For example, UNIX treats a and A
differently just as it treats = and % differently. I see no reason to
restrict filenames to [a-zA-Z0-9] and a few special characters like .
and -; and given that uniformity case folding makes as much (or as
little) sense as folding 0123456789 onto !"#$%&'()* (to pick a
particularly silly example).
I would say that (1) is not particularly useful, but it can be nice to
be able to create files named D.mcgill-X04T2 and D.mcgill-X04t2 in the
same directory. This is less of an issue, though; it's just as easy to
make a program use base-36 as base-62 or base-126.
der Mouse
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Volume-Number: Volume 8, Number 57
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