Explanation of "Case-sensitive"

[Barry Margolin]

In article <175100004 at hobbiton> fieland at hobbiton.prime.com writes:
>I think that the reason C is case-sensitive is that UNIX is case-sensitive,
>and C was used to write the UNIX kernel. 

And the reason Unix is case-sensitive is that it was modeled after
Multics, which is also case-sensitive.  I suspect that the reason
Multics was made case-sensitive was that it seemed more modern.  At
the time, many computer terminals and printers were uppercase-only,
but the new-fangled IBM 2741 terminal had recently come out and it
provided lowercase.  Therefore, they decided to take advantage of the
availability of lowercase and allow case to be used to distinguish
things.

What probably would have made more sense would have been
case-preserving in things like file names; this means that case is
insignificant in lookups, but when you create a file (or user, or
whatever) the case you use is remembered (this is the scheme used in
the Macintosh file system).  But at the time there was little
experience with dual-case systems, so they probably chose the
simplest-seeming scheme.

This is getting beyond the scope of C....

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar