this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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[–] Takumidesh 65 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (26 children)

Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn't make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).

And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren't actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.

'A' != 'a', they are just as unequal as 'a' and 'b'

Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers' intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Case insensitive handling protects end-users from doing "bad" things and confusion.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

I work with a lot of users and a lot of files in my job.

I don't remember a single case, where someone had an issue because of upper- or lowercase confusions.

[–] moseschrute 5 points 2 weeks ago

Most of my frustration comes from combining cases insensitive folders/files with git and then running my code on another machine. If you aren’t coding where you have hundreds of files that import other files, I could see this being a non issues.

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