3 ms·

CasE-SenSITIVITY IS rarE IN ENGLISH? I WiSh SOMEone would'VE TOLD mE EARliER!

by dtech 8y ago

palunon 8y ago
Tell it to the lawyers writing disclaimers in uppercase.
- drdaeman 8y ago
  That's an artifact of the years past, still alive because everyone is too afraid to do something about it, and most lawyers just don't care about styling. Every time I copy a license to the project, I edit the formatting to use Markdown bold (or sometimes italic/emphasis) instead of ALL THAT UPPERCASE SCREAMING. Much easier for the eyes. IANAL, but I believe that was the intent. Just to highlight the important sections to be even safer with "you have been warned about this and can't say you haven't noticed it". If any lawyer out there knows if this is correct understanding or not - would be interesting to hear.
acdha 8y ago
When was the last time you had someone refuse to deliver a letter to YOUR NAME in YOUR CITY? Ever have trouble catching a plane because your drivers license says Alice but your boarding pass says ALICE? Normal people don't think of case as changing the value in the same way that even abbreviations or alternate spellings do — I know people who've had trouble boarding planes because they have ID/boarding passes which are inconsistent on, say, using ü or ue – especially annoying when the latter usage was just to work around a bug in someone else's system.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Capitalization of proper nouns is a core semantic feature of English. While I'm sure you'll be tempted to hand-wave it away as a special case (see what I did there) of case-sensitivity, it nonetheless refutes your argument.
  - Pxtl 8y ago
    The problem comes primarily from systems that allow identifiers (or other semantically meaningful concepts like format strings) to differ only by case. This could be considered a side-quest of the naive implementation of case-sensitivity. "Case-sensitive but identifiers cannot differ only by case" would be a reasonable compromise. "Martin" and "martin" are obviously not different names. Martin may be more correct, but allowing "martin" as a separate name is worse.
  - anticensor 8y ago
    > Capitalization of proper nouns is a core semantic feature of English. It is a core spelling rule of English. They could have gone the German way, with all nouns capitalised and compound words without spaces.
  - acdha 8y ago
    No, as you'd learn if you tried to find counter-examples for the cases I mentioned. Computer systems commonly treat terms which differ only in case as separate values but humans almost always try to do the opposite. People have preferences for proper usage but that's quite different from treating alternate case values as separate because people try to recognize the intention even if it's poorly expressed.

CasE-SenSITIVITY IS rarE IN ENGLISH? I WiSh SOMEone would'VE TOLD mE EARliER!

by dtech 8y ago

CasE-SenSITIVITY IS rarE IN ENGLISH? I WiSh SOMEone would'VE TOLD mE EARliER!

palunon 8y ago

Tell it to the lawyers writing disclaimers in uppercase.

drdaeman 8y ago
That's an artifact of the years past, still alive because everyone is too afraid to do something about it, and most lawyers just don't care about styling. Every time I copy a license to the project, I edit the formatting to use Markdown bold (or sometimes italic/emphasis) instead of ALL THAT UPPERCASE SCREAMING. Much easier for the eyes. IANAL, but I believe that was the intent. Just to highlight the important sections to be even safer with "you have been warned about this and can't say you haven't noticed it". If any lawyer out there knows if this is correct understanding or not - would be interesting to hear.

acdha 8y ago

When was the last time you had someone refuse to deliver a letter to YOUR NAME in YOUR CITY? Ever have trouble catching a plane because your drivers license says Alice but your boarding pass says ALICE? Normal people don't think of case as changing the value in the same way that even abbreviations or alternate spellings do — I know people who've had trouble boarding planes because they have ID/boarding passes which are inconsistent on, say, using ü or ue – especially annoying when the latter usage was just to work around a bug in someone else's system.

ghostly_s 8y ago
Capitalization of proper nouns is a core semantic feature of English. While I'm sure you'll be tempted to hand-wave it away as a special case (see what I did there) of case-sensitivity, it nonetheless refutes your argument.
- Pxtl 8y ago
  The problem comes primarily from systems that allow identifiers (or other semantically meaningful concepts like format strings) to differ only by case. This could be considered a side-quest of the naive implementation of case-sensitivity. "Case-sensitive but identifiers cannot differ only by case" would be a reasonable compromise. "Martin" and "martin" are obviously not different names. Martin may be more correct, but allowing "martin" as a separate name is worse.
- anticensor 8y ago
  > Capitalization of proper nouns is a core semantic feature of English. It is a core spelling rule of English. They could have gone the German way, with all nouns capitalised and compound words without spaces.
- acdha 8y ago
  No, as you'd learn if you tried to find counter-examples for the cases I mentioned. Computer systems commonly treat terms which differ only in case as separate values but humans almost always try to do the opposite. People have preferences for proper usage but that's quite different from treating alternate case values as separate because people try to recognize the intention even if it's poorly expressed.