Re: Deprecate and remove case-insensitive constants?

"Lester Caine" wrote in message news:d97cd2e5-bd5b-4c9f-2c20-107560d5a2e5@lsces.co.uk...

On 15/09/17 12:13, Tony Marston wrote:

My argument is that far too many people have become used to case insensitive software, and to remove this "feature" for no other reason than the programmers involved would find it "more convenient" to remove the feature altogether rather than make the effort in implementing a proper solution would go down like a ton of bricks with all those users.

case-insensitive only works reliably for an ascii character set. This is what the vast majority of PROGRAMMERS expect to see. Even Microsoft 16bit subset of unicode characters can not RELIABLY be upper or lower cased, but add the full unicode set and the conflicts of the number of characters required for one or other conversion explains why a conversion to unicode in the core proved impractical.

It may be impractical for lazy programmers, but it is not impossible. While unicode can comfortably deal with one-to-one case mappings, it does provide the means to specify one-to-many case mappings and other special cases. All it needs is for all these special cases to be identified and the "problem" is alleviated.

The main point here is that it may be ESSENTIAL to introduce a switch to case sensitive if we are also to convert to full unicode support. The alternative is to restrict the character set back to ascii for all programming operations if case-insensitivity is to be retained.

Good idea. If certain characters cause problems when switching case then those characters should be banned.

And how many of you have hit the problem of Windows supplying a CamelCase version of a file name when it was entered lower case.

I haven't, but I always take the precaution of downshifting all file names in order to avoid problems with that PITA called unix/linux.

Since all our web servers are 'non-windows', hitting the idiosyncrasies of these inappropriate case conversions just adds to the fun. That may not the happening these days, but cause major problems at one time!

There are still inconsistencies when different browsers render the same HTML, CSS or Javascript differently. -- Tony Marston