9 ms·

If you count writing systems, a small subset has an upper/lower distinction: Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic, and maybe a handful of others. Not Arabic, Chinese, Ja

If you count writing systems, a small subset has an upper/lower distinction: Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic, and maybe a handful of others. Not Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Devanagari, Tamil, Thai, Thaana, Bengali, Hebrew, or a bunch of other scripts. If on the other hand you count the languages that use writing systems with an upper/lower case distinction, then most use Latin, a much smaller set use Cyrillic; and the rest of the writing systems are used by one or two languages each, with the notable exception of the Arabic script. So most scripts lack an upper/lower case distinction, but probably most languages use a script that does have such a distinction.

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
Exactly, and among those languages that have a case distinction quite a few have at least one edge case (like German ß vs ss vs ẞ) where the transformation isn't bijective. Or it's position-dependent. If you want case insensitivity, and you also want internationalization, you'd better hope you have a good library that handles the edge cases, or you'll get a bunch of errors. Case-sensitive is far easier to program.
- g-b-r 6y ago
  When dealing with case you rarely (if ever) need bijective transformations... Case-insensitive search/comparison requires a temporary mapping, not a permanent transformation; the German case is easily handled in Unicode's CaseFolding.txt by just mapping all three of them either to ss or to ß (depending on the implementer, if he prefers a length-invariant mapping or not). Position-dependent? I read about it, but the Unicode case folding algorithm doesn't support it, so I imagine it's not considered useful for case-insensitive comparison You will probably do want a good library when dealing with Unicode, but for this case thing it actually doesn't seem to be that complex to implement by hand... I don't doubt case-sensitive is far easier to program , but you usually program for some user's sake, not for your own pleasure :) And in most cases a normal user expects case-insensitive search
g-b-r 6y ago
Yeah, I was lax, "small subset of writing systems" is probably true, but that small subset is used by a very large portion of humanity, so I don't think that the idea that "case insensitivity" is a generally meaningful concept is a falsehood. More precisely, I would probably agree that the concept of case is not so useful and we'd probably live well if it were only a graphical attribute (or not even that), without any uppercase (or lowercase) character in the character sets, but since the characters do exist as of now, are spread everywhere in text and in almost any case when a user of a bicameral * script (or at least the Latin one) wants to search normal text he wants a case-insensitive search, your software would better be able to perform it, and usually by default. By the way, I refreshed my Unicode and it doesn't look like Unicode case-insensitive is that difficult, it would seem that you basically only have to perform the mappings listed in CaseFolding.txt (+ maybe the normalization steps). * I'm ashamed to admit that I either just learned the term or had completely forgot about it

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago

Exactly, and among those languages that have a case distinction quite a few have at least one edge case (like German ß vs ss vs ẞ) where the transformation isn't bijective. Or it's position-dependent. If you want case insensitivity, and you also want internationalization, you'd better hope you have a good library that handles the edge cases, or you'll get a bunch of errors. Case-sensitive is far easier to program.

g-b-r 6y ago
When dealing with case you rarely (if ever) need bijective transformations... Case-insensitive search/comparison requires a temporary mapping, not a permanent transformation; the German case is easily handled in Unicode's CaseFolding.txt by just mapping all three of them either to ss or to ß (depending on the implementer, if he prefers a length-invariant mapping or not). Position-dependent? I read about it, but the Unicode case folding algorithm doesn't support it, so I imagine it's not considered useful for case-insensitive comparison You will probably do want a good library when dealing with Unicode, but for this case thing it actually doesn't seem to be that complex to implement by hand... I don't doubt case-sensitive is far easier to program , but you usually program for some user's sake, not for your own pleasure :) And in most cases a normal user expects case-insensitive search

g-b-r 6y ago

Yeah, I was lax, "small subset of writing systems" is probably true, but that small subset is used by a very large portion of humanity, so I don't think that the idea that "case insensitivity" is a generally meaningful concept is a falsehood. More precisely, I would probably agree that the concept of case is not so useful and we'd probably live well if it were only a graphical attribute (or not even that), without any uppercase (or lowercase) character in the character sets, but since the characters do exist as of now, are spread everywhere in text and in almost any case when a user of a bicameral * script (or at least the Latin one) wants to search normal text he wants a case-insensitive search, your software would better be able to perform it, and usually by default. By the way, I refreshed my Unicode and it doesn't look like Unicode case-insensitive is that difficult, it would seem that you basically only have to perform the mappings listed in CaseFolding.txt (+ maybe the normalization steps). * I'm ashamed to admit that I either just learned the term or had completely forgot about it