Re: zsh - new user with questions

[Goran Larsson <hoh@lorelei.approve.se>]

On 19 Aug, Stephen Riehm wrote:

>  If there's a wishlist or a todo list for zsh, I would really like to add
>  this feature to it! (I personally think the Amiga
>  dudes got it right back in '86 when they made the file names were only
>  stores case sensitive - but all operations
>  at OS level were case insensitive - thus it was impossible to have ReadMe
>  and README in the same directory.
>  
>  I personally think this reduces possible confusion, (does make read
>  Makefile or makefile first?) and makes
>  case insensitive completion trivial. - just my 2cents)

This is trivial if you only care about filenames using A..Z and a..z.
For filenames using other characters this must turn into a nightmare.
Some languages does not have a 1:1 mapping between upper and lower
case letters. One such example is the German "doube s" ß. Imagine
a language where 'z' does not have an upper case version and is
written as 'S' instead.

Set the language setting to English and create the file "Tezt".

   Filename on disk:    Tezt
   Open with:           Test (no)   Tezt (yes)   TEST (no)   TEZT (yes)

Change the language setting to the other language and try again.

   Filename on disk:    Tezt
   Open with:           Test (no)   Tezt (yes)   TEST (yes)  TEZT (what?)

Confusing? Confuzing?

How does Amiga handle this? How does MS win9[58] handle this?

Isn't it much easier to just say that upper and lower case are
distinct letters?

-- 
 Goran Larsson            hoh@approve.se
 I was an atheist,        http://home1.swipnet.se/%7Ew-12153/
 until I found out I was God.