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

(www.vintagecomputing.com)
136 points colinbartlett | 1 comments | 10 May 25 21:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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sillystu04 ◴[10 May 25 22:47 UTC] No.43949644[source]▶
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.

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1. volemo ◴[11 May 25 00:25 UTC] No.43950178[source]▶
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