> Case insensitivity is arbitrarily stupid; you're taking two subranges of a character set and making them equal. I think this is backwards. Languages are top

> Case insensitivity is arbitrarily stupid; you're taking two subranges of a character set and making them equal. I think this is backwards. Languages are top-down, and character sets are bottom-up. A language can reasonably choose to use the common concept of "the 26 English letters (ignoring case)". This would require dealing with such implementation details as "subranges of character sets" only because that's the platform that computers today present. It's not unique to characters. Many programming languages say that 2 is equal to 2.0 (and 2/1 and (2,0) and ...), even though their internal bit patterns are usually completely different. We simply decided that this is the semantic meaning that we wish to expose to users, and the implementor has to work out how to deal with IEEE FP and such. > It ignores the fact that there are semantic differences linked to case: like Pole is someone from Poland, whereas pole is one end of a magnet. There are also semantic differences from context and from pronunciation -- English is pretty stupid -- but I don't think anyone would suggest appending every identifier in a program with a pronunciation key, or the OED meaning. Just because a word without capitalization can be ambiguous doesn't mean a word with its capitalization is unambiguous, or even that this would be desirable if it were.