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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: 0s | 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. cryptonector ◴[11 May 25 17:06 UTC] No.43955161[source]▶
> 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.