3 ms·

> Has anyone here ever had a use case for toLower() where they actually wanted localization to apply? How do you lowercase without localization? Remember all t

> Has anyone here ever had a use case for toLower() where they actually wanted localization to apply? How do you lowercase without localization? Remember all text isn't English. Unless you're actually asking if anyone has ever had a use case for lower-casing non-English text?

lmm 6y ago
I think the real question is: is there any use case for toLower() where you want the system default locale to be applied? If you want to lower-case text for "system" purposes then you need to keep track of the locale associated with that text (which won't generally be the locale of the system the program is running on); the only case where you want to use the system default locale is where you're interacting with the (human) user of the system, but it's hard to imagine a use case where you'd want to use toLower() for displaying text to the user.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  > it's hard to imagine a use case where you'd want to use toLower() for displaying text to the user. Maybe for automatically changing the case of user input (auto-correcting capitalization, etc.).
- phonebanshee 6y ago
  You vastly underestimate the desire of people for things to look 'nice' where 'nice' is defined by exactly what they mean when they say it. If you want a 'nice' display of data that's input by users, you're often going to butcher it by doing things like converting everything to lower-case, then maybe upper-casing the first letter. Because 'nice.' It's horrifically wrong, of course, but no one is going to think you're a reasonable person for insisting that correct wins over nice. Imagine a real-world scenario where you're displaying a list of names of users, where the users got to type in their own names. You can either use what users typed in, or you can do something like process it so it's in the American idea of initial caps. You can't possibly do localization, since it's a list of names of people in the US, so it's melting pot of names from all over the world, and you never asked for user input of what you'd use to localize it anyway [and no, you absolutely can't figure that out from just the name itself]. You can't use what users typed in, because the design team thinks that looks like a horrible mess (and it is; users are laughably bad at data entry). So the design team wins, and you butcher everything by pretending that toLower() plus toUpper() for the first character of every word is a sensible thing to do. (And yes, that's a painful real-world example of software I've shipped and that was used by millions of people.)

lmm 6y ago

I think the real question is: is there any use case for toLower() where you want the system default locale to be applied? If you want to lower-case text for "system" purposes then you need to keep track of the locale associated with that text (which won't generally be the locale of the system the program is running on); the only case where you want to use the system default locale is where you're interacting with the (human) user of the system, but it's hard to imagine a use case where you'd want to use toLower() for displaying text to the user.

mehrdadn 6y ago
> it's hard to imagine a use case where you'd want to use toLower() for displaying text to the user. Maybe for automatically changing the case of user input (auto-correcting capitalization, etc.).
phonebanshee 6y ago
You vastly underestimate the desire of people for things to look 'nice' where 'nice' is defined by exactly what they mean when they say it. If you want a 'nice' display of data that's input by users, you're often going to butcher it by doing things like converting everything to lower-case, then maybe upper-casing the first letter. Because 'nice.' It's horrifically wrong, of course, but no one is going to think you're a reasonable person for insisting that correct wins over nice. Imagine a real-world scenario where you're displaying a list of names of users, where the users got to type in their own names. You can either use what users typed in, or you can do something like process it so it's in the American idea of initial caps. You can't possibly do localization, since it's a list of names of people in the US, so it's melting pot of names from all over the world, and you never asked for user input of what you'd use to localize it anyway [and no, you absolutely can't figure that out from just the name itself]. You can't use what users typed in, because the design team thinks that looks like a horrible mess (and it is; users are laughably bad at data entry). So the design team wins, and you butcher everything by pretending that toLower() plus toUpper() for the first character of every word is a sensible thing to do. (And yes, that's a painful real-world example of software I've shipped and that was used by millions of people.)