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It's rather intuitive that you can have multiple files. They're right there in your directory, and you see them: a.txt A.txt And you get that they're files.. It

by dusted 6y ago

It's rather intuitive that you can have multiple files. They're right there in your directory, and you see them: a.txt A.txt And you get that they're files.. It's just plain weird to do extra work to eliminate this freedom. I don't think anyone needs to explain it to anyone.. If you've already decided only to have files in one case, you'll never need to communicate this.. If you've decided to make use of both, you'll refer to them by their casing.. "mom, please open the myfile.txt, the one with an uppercase M", except, in writing, we don't even need to be so specific.. In my email to mom, I'll write "Please open MyFile.txt" and when mom sees theat there is a myFile.txt and MyFile.txt in the directory, she won't have trouble figuring out which one I meant."

Joker_vD 6y ago
By that argument, you might as well have files with the same name, if you can "just see them". And let's not even start with non-English auditory where you have to render filenames as "С as a dollar, У, another С as a dollar, English T, E, M" (that's "system" btw).
- toyg 6y ago
  I agree. I wish NATO alphabet could taught in schools and become the world standard for spelling the Latin alphabet; my quality of life improved significantly after I learnt it (by accident, on a job).
toyg 6y ago
> there is a myFile.txt and MyFile.txt in the directory, she won't have trouble figuring out which one I meant. Your mom is pretty good at IT, clearly. In my experience, this sort of scenario with "normal users" will result in one of the following: - user opens both files and tries to figure out which one "looks better" for the task at hand. If questioned later, they will likely hide this fact to avoid having to admit their judgement was somehow involved. - user fires back an email saying "there are two files with that name !! Please do it for me, this is complicated !!11!" Case sensitivity looks like an advantage only to us nerds. There is a reason many systems go all-uppercase-all-the-time, even where they could easily use casing: it's a big source of confusion. Spoken language has no case, after all.
Majromax 6y ago
> In my email to mom, I'll write "Please open MyFile.txt" and when mom sees theat there is a myFile.txt and MyFile.txt in the directory, she won't have trouble figuring out which one I meant." But if she (or any normal user) only sees 'myfile.txt' or "myFile.txt" or "Myfile.txt", she wouldn't respond with "that file doesn't exist." Instead, she'd be more likely to assume you made a mistake in your specification. Read through the comments on the LWN article: case insensitivity is a practical problem because user-space implementations (such as samba) must perform an O(N) check across all files in a directory before confirming that a file doesn't exist. At the same time, existing programs that assume case-insensitivity (coming from the Mac and Windows worlds, mostly) are often none too consistent about creating 'foo.txt' but opening it (potentially from another program) as 'FOO.TXT'.

by dusted 6y ago

Joker_vD 6y ago

By that argument, you might as well have files with the same name, if you can "just see them". And let's not even start with non-English auditory where you have to render filenames as "С as a dollar, У, another С as a dollar, English T, E, M" (that's "system" btw).

toyg 6y ago
I agree. I wish NATO alphabet could taught in schools and become the world standard for spelling the Latin alphabet; my quality of life improved significantly after I learnt it (by accident, on a job).

toyg 6y ago

> there is a myFile.txt and MyFile.txt in the directory, she won't have trouble figuring out which one I meant. Your mom is pretty good at IT, clearly. In my experience, this sort of scenario with "normal users" will result in one of the following: - user opens both files and tries to figure out which one "looks better" for the task at hand. If questioned later, they will likely hide this fact to avoid having to admit their judgement was somehow involved. - user fires back an email saying "there are two files with that name !! Please do it for me, this is complicated !!11!" Case sensitivity looks like an advantage only to us nerds. There is a reason many systems go all-uppercase-all-the-time, even where they could easily use casing: it's a big source of confusion. Spoken language has no case, after all.

Majromax 6y ago

> In my email to mom, I'll write "Please open MyFile.txt" and when mom sees theat there is a myFile.txt and MyFile.txt in the directory, she won't have trouble figuring out which one I meant." But if she (or any normal user) only sees 'myfile.txt' or "myFile.txt" or "Myfile.txt", she wouldn't respond with "that file doesn't exist." Instead, she'd be more likely to assume you made a mistake in your specification. Read through the comments on the LWN article: case insensitivity is a practical problem because user-space implementations (such as samba) must perform an O(N) check across all files in a directory before confirming that a file doesn't exist. At the same time, existing programs that assume case-insensitivity (coming from the Mac and Windows worlds, mostly) are often none too consistent about creating 'foo.txt' but opening it (potentially from another program) as 'FOO.TXT'.