On 4/5/2018 5:23 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
Case folding I find funnier however. Back in the days of 5 and 6 bit codes, particularly when file names were stored in things like rad50 it made perfect sense.   The basic character code did not handle upper and lower well, and many keyboards were only one case anyway.   But by the time of the 8 bit byte, CP/M and it's child DOS, blindly follow along.  Instead of thinking why it was done and since we have a new file system format and thinking -- hmmm maybe we don't need to have the same limitation.


I come from the world of SIXBIT on TOPS-10. One of my first tasks for LIRICS/BOCES was to write a replacement for MIC, while still in High School. The TTY I used did only upper case. So all the comments in that source code were in upper case.

When it came to real ASCII, and keyboard input, you could never assume that the TTY was going to give you lower case by default (or upper, for that matter). What to do? Be case-insensitive in everything you do.

While I understand the simplicity of the code that had to deal with filenames in UNIX (no flipping bits), I don't understand why a file README.TXT is different than readme.txt in UNIX.

Now, I love UNIX - I wouldn't have it any other way, but I often wonder what the design goal was. As for a "limitation" for case-sensitive file names, it's more like a feature to me.

art k.