Re: case-sensitivity

"Joe Marshall" <eval.apply@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

If no normalization is done, then symbols that apparently are the same
may actually not be EQ?. Furthemore, `grepping' for a symbol may fail
if the wrong code points are used.

It's not different for filenames (except on MacOS) or grep that you
mentioned.

The solution is to avoid using different representations in different
places, not to force all programs to apply various equivalence
relations. The latter is unrealistic: there are too many places
where strings are compared.

Folding makes sense for user-oriented searches, e.g. browsing text
files. In programming unambiguity and precision is more important.

DOS/Windows made a mistake of case-insensitive filenames. Since
filenames are stored and processed differently in different
environments (DOS CP on FAT in short filenames - it's not stored
anywhere which encoding is used; Windows CP in WinAPI; UTF-16 in long
filenames, on NTFS and in newer subsets of WinAPI), filenames created
on some versions of Windows with some locales are inaccessible in some
other versions with different locales, or only for some programs
depending on which API flavor is used.

--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk
\__/ qrczak@xxxxxxxxxx
^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/
.

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