Why the Apple II Didn't Support Lowercase Letters (2020)

I wish modern computers considered casing to be purely a matter of style, such that “S” == “s” evaluates to true.

Casing is rarely semantically important, so case sensitivity is widely ignored. But in many circumstances this gets implemented in a haphazard way. For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.

Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German.

Sadly it’s too late to change this because doing so would be such a breaking change.

I like that I can write:

    Window* window = new Window(...)

You probably don’t like this:

  String string = “String.com”;

I don't see the problem to be honest.

But modern computers do that for the most part. Standard search features default to case insensitivity and Windows & Mac OS have a case insensitive file system. But in other contexts it doesn't make sense considering it's part of the grammar.

> Also case sensitivity makes internationalisation awkward, particularly with German

How would it make anything more awkward?

> For example some sites consider foo@gmail.com and foo@GMAIL.COM to be different email addresses.

I like it when such sites have a bug bounty program, or free offers for new users. Free money is nice.

I wish [1] our (western) culture was not built on a bicameral [2] alphabet, but c'est la vie: uppercase and lowercase are distinct through out our lives, and thus computers must not break the norm. “MW” != “mW” and “Taylor” != “taylor”.

[1]: Capitalisation could have been made purely stylistic, the same way italics are — it’s a helpful hint for the reader, but isn’t expected to convey meaning on its own, therefore, generally can be stripped without loss of information.

[2]: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicase

You don't need case sensitivity for that.

Perhaps if you redesigned the language. But case sensitivity makes things a lot clearer.

Standard search features, for example the start menu of Windows have so severe bugs and shortcomings, that I am not sure they get anything right and would not trust them with lower und upper case either. For example type too early in the start menu, and you might just find nothing, after which it might search online. If you delete the text and type again, suddenly it finds stuff... critical race right there. Or how it finds something, when one types the first 3 letters that match, but when typing the fourth letter, the search result disappears...

People make searches so broken, it makes me think they have no idea what they are doing. The bigger the company, the worse the search usually is. I think it is maybe a result of non-tech companies hiring silly contractors, who do half-assed work, hoping that people will be so happy, that they get another contract later. Their customers are not the users, but the company that hired them. In case of MS it is probably ... hm, idk, sheer incompetence, I guess.

Oh, I fully agree about Windows search. But that's more a case of a company just having no incentives to make their product usable because people buy it anyway.

I can't imagine that working in any programming language, given the smart quotes.

> Casing is rarely semantically important

Yet you're using it yourself.

I'd rather we stop using capitals than have to make everything case-insensitive. Case-insensitivity is so very annoying to me.

But you're in luck: case-insensitivity is available in many contexts.

Imagine if instead you could write:

  w̲i̲n̲d̲o̲w̲* window = new w̲i̲n̲d̲o̲w̲(...)

(that's the original ALGOL 60 reference language syntax, for the curious; although it didn't have user-defined types, so it was keywords that were underlined)

Then there's the Smalltalk approach:

  aWindow := Window new ...