The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

hoodaticus · 2010-11-08 Reply Admin

EvanED:
TRWTF:
...whereas the standardised alphabet defines "f" to be a lowercase (and therefore different) form of "F".

It's a different form, but I'm far from convinced that it has a significantly different meaning.

But OK then. Go ahead and explain the difference in meaning between, say, "bottle" and "Bottle".

"Bottle" is an instance name, and "bottle" is a class. Articles such as "the" and "a" let you refer to an instance without using its proper name.

2010-11-09 Reply Admin

Zylon:
What IS the argument for case-sensitive names, anyway?

As well as all the other reasons given above, like consistency and fast compilation, there's one very good reason to avoid case-insensitivity: case transformations are locale-dependent.

In German, for example, $groß and $GROSS would have to be considered the same; in Turkish, $fii should be considered identical to $Fİİ, not $FII (which would be the capital form of $fıı); in old Spanish, the correct capitalisation of $chorizon would be $ChORIZON. It's not even entirely obvious what counts as a ‘case’: do you equate $ふー and $フー? What about all the other equivalences that humans make? Should we have the language consider $color and $colour equivalent?

CAPTCHA: ‘dolor’, as indeed case-insensitivity is!

Jaime · 2010-11-09 Reply Admin

Anonymous Braveheart:
Zylon:
What IS the argument for case-sensitive names, anyway?
As well as all the other reasons given above, like consistency and fast compilation, there's one very good reason to avoid case-insensitivity: case transformations are locale-dependent.
In German, for example, $groß and $GROSS would have to be considered the same; in Turkish, $fii should be considered identical to $Fİİ, not $FII (which would be the capital form of $fıı); in old Spanish, the correct capitalisation of $chorizon would be $ChORIZON. It's not even entirely obvious what counts as a ‘case’: do you equate $ふー and $フー? What about all the other equivalences that humans make? Should we have the language consider $color and $colour equivalent?

CAPTCHA: ‘dolor’, as indeed case-insensitivity is!

Unicode comparisons already have interesting issues even without considering case.

These are different Unicode strings (followed by the code points used in each string): Å - U+00C5 Å - U+0041 U+030A

However, the Unicode spec says that they are equivalent. They also likely look the same in your browser. So, you really can't avoid these issues by simply making the language case sensitive.

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