Looking at case insensitivity - question

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 08:12 -0700, Jens Alfke wrote:
> On 17 Apr '08, at 5:05 AM, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> 
> > Ok. I think it is obvious that I'm strongly biased and speaking as  
> > Unix user.
> 
> I'm a Unix user too, and strongly biased the other way (because my  
> Unix is Mac OS X, which also defaults to a case-insensitive filesystem.)
> I think we can agree that case-sensitive filesystems are more  
> convenient for software development. But case-insensitive ones make  
> more sense to non-geeky end-users, which is why the Mac OS has used  
> one since 1984 and Windows since 1995.

Apple's filesystems are case-insensitve by virtue of not having
lowercase on the Apple ][.

Windows gets its case-insensitivity from DOS, DOS got it from CP/M, CP/M
got it from VMS, and VMS got it from RSX-11. Which again.. had no
lowercase.

As UNIX's first practical use wall roff-style typesetting, lowercase has
always been available (even if not visible at the terminal).

>  Neither type is going away,  
> neither type is "oddball", and I'll leave it up to you to work out  
> which one is in the majority.

Perhaps case preserving but case insensitive is not "oddball", but it's
definitely "unfortunate". Either alone is ok, but together, many
difficulties appear for interoperability.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.