←back to thread

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: 0.211s | source
Show context
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.

replies(5): >>43949674 #>>43949915 #>>43949997 #>>43950178 #>>43955161 #
amelius ◴[10 May 25 22:52 UTC] No.43949674[source]▶
I like that I can write:

    Window* window = new Window(...)
replies(3): >>43949697 #>>43950276 #>>43959531 #
1. int_19h ◴[12 May 25 03:59 UTC] No.43959531[source]▶
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 ...