Re: New Book: The School of Niklaus Wirth

"Mikael Lyngvig" <mikael@pobox.com> wrote:


>It could just be a simple question of "being able to adopt to customer
>demands".
>
>Case-sensitivity, in file names and programming languages, is
>basically a very strange and illogical thing since humans tend to
>recognize names that differ solely in case without problems
>("seBAStian mOLEski" would probably work, if I wanted to get in touch
>with you. Also, you would probably be annoyed if your neighboor
>changed his name to "SebastiAn Moleski" claiming that the name had
>nothing to do with your name).


          Given the names "MacKie" and "Mackie" which are said differently,
what would you do?


>The fact that ill-designed languages such as C++, and C to a certain
>degree, have indoctrinated programmers to think case-sensitively
>should not be blamed upon Mr. Wirth.


          Let's not blame it on programming languages if any blame is
needed. It started much sooner. Remember spelling words in school
and how it was wrong if you didn't say "capital" as appropriate.


>Imagine that your mails, delivered via postal service, starts to
>bounce because you'd accidentally written "main Street" rather than
>"Main Street" (or the postal worker thinks you've written "main"
>rather than "Main")...
>
>Case-insensitivity IS the simple solution. You don't have to worry
>about case. I don't have to worry about case. We can spend our time
>being productive instead...


          No, instead what we have to do is:
    1) convert all strings to one case before comparison. (How's that
for in your face?) OR
    2) define a comparison operator that ignores case. ("Oh, here's
your bug. You used the case-sensitive compare instead of the
case-insensitive compare." (something like = and == in C))


          So much for not worrying about case.


          I think I'll just ignore ignoring case and get on with it.


[snipped previous]


Sincerely,


Gene Wirchenko
[Enough about upper and lower case. FYI, in another newsgroup Dennis
Ritchie noted that Unix file names are case sensitive because Multics
names were and they liked it that way. I imagine this influenced C as
well. -John]

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