Case Sensitive file names

[Guest Moderator, John B. Chambers]

Date:     Mon, 6 Oct 86 0:30:45 EDT
From: Bernie Cosell <cosell at prophet.bbn.com>
Subject:  Case Sensitive file names

To my view, the case folders have to make a VERY strong case that
case-sensitivity is a bad thing before we could justify BUILDING IN
that somewhat arbitrary limitation onto the operating system.  As has
been mentioned, if the filesystem is left alone, then it is easy to
envision that for certain uses, certain users *might* want to use (or
to use utilities that use...) a variant or (or layer on) stdio that
simply toupper's the filename string in the fopen call.  The users
that didn't need or want such a limitation should be free to do as
they wish.

Note that most of these other systems that are being presented as
exemplars have pretty horrible filename conventions (most punctuation
marks are not legal, certainly control chars aren't legal, the
equivalent of '..' is *built in* to the kernel, the operation of '.'
is *built in*.  I've always thought that was a crock!

>From what I've heard of the arguments so far, coupled with my biases,
I'd vote to keep it case-sensitive (but then, of course, I don't have
a vote so that hardly matters... :-).
 
  /Bernie

Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 23