Looking at case insensitivity - question

[Jens Alfke]

On 17 Apr '08, at 2:59 PM, Matt Mackall wrote:

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

I was going to flame you for going way off-topic, but then I looked at  
the From: line. Since you own this list, I s'pose that means it's fair  
game.

You have no idea what you're talking about here, Matt. The Mac  
architecture was in no way a descendent of the Apple ][, either in  
software or hardware. They weren't even designed by the same people.  
There wasn't initially any interoperability between them, so there was  
no reason to limit any features based on the earlier system's  
limitations.

Everything down to the filesystem was rethought in the Mac, compared  
to DOS and Unix as well as the Apple ][, and case-insensitivity was an  
intentional choice.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder.txt&topic=Software%20Design&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

And yes, I have experience with all of these — I wrote a disk sector  
editor for the Apple ][, I've been using Unix since the VAX days of  
the early '80s, and programming Macs since 1987. So I think I know  
what I'm talking about here.

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

So what? The Apple ][ had lowercase internally too, since both systems  
used ascii. I wrote high school papers in word processors that stored  
and printed lowercase (they indicated uppercase onscreen as inverse  
video.) IBM PCs obviously had lowercase too, since they were selling  
into businesses that needed to do word processing.

> 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.

I agree that interoperability is a problem. But trying to push blame  
onto one side is getting really, really tiresome (and calling it  
"oddball" is a misnomer when it represents the vast majority of  
computers). This is distracting from the real issues. Please stop  
acting like the Dilbert parody of the Insufferably Smug Unix Guy.

—Jens
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