<\/p>\n
Let’s spend a moment exploring the world of case-sensitivity. I am, of course, not talking about the skills of a baggage-handler. I am talking about the way software deals with the differences between upper-case and lower-case characters. <\/p>\n
Particularly relevant examples include:<\/p>\n
There is a logical hierarchy of the way software can treat case. I will talk through each one of these below.<\/p>\n
(Why am I going on about the different types of case-sensitivity with a neutral point-of-view? Bear with me. I’m building up a framework for an argument. I’ll come back to this later on.)<\/em><\/p>\n Many software systems are case-sensitive. The character string “ Examples include:<\/p>\n Conversely, many software systems are case-insensitive. The character string “ Examples include: <\/p>\n In some circumstances – particularly with search engines or the execution of scripts – this suffices to characterise the processing. However, in many circumstances, the software processing the text string has the opportunity to change<\/em> the case of the text string into a canonical form. The following sections outline the options.<\/p>\n If the case of the original text is not modified, the software is said to be case preserving<\/em>.<\/p>\n Examples include:<\/p>\n If the software modifies the case of the original text to put it into a canonical form<\/em>, it is non-case preserving<\/em>.<\/p>\n Such software can be further classified into the following sub-categories.<\/p>\n If the software always converts the case to a fixed style (whether it be upper-case, lower-case, title-case, sentence-case, etc.) then I refer to it here as using a fixed style canonical form<\/em>.<\/p>\n Examples include:<\/p>\n In some situations, each identified or word may have an official declaration – e.g. identifiers in Ada, proper nouns in spelling dictionaries. Each reference to the object can be transformed to match the declaration.<\/p>\n This is a special category to describe an early IDE for Microsoft’s BASIC family. (I believe it was QuickBASIC, but it may have been Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS, or even QBASIC.) When an identifier was typed in with an unexpected capitalisation, all previous references to the identifier would be modified to match the most recent capitalisation.<\/p>\n Another way of dealing with case, especially in searches, is to use what I have dubbed “asymmetric case-sensitivity”. <\/p>\n Under this system, if a user searched for “ However, if the user searched for “ This system suffers from theoretical limits (you can’t do a case-sensitive search for “ Examples include:<\/p>\n A review of the different ways that different software treats case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[200,199,202,374],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software-development","tag-case-preserving","tag-case-sensitivity","tag-comparison","tag-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Case Sensitivity<\/h2>\n
foo<\/code>” and the character string “Foo<\/code>” are not considered to be equivalent.<\/p>\n\n
Case Insensitivity<\/h2>\n
foo<\/code>” and the character string “Foo<\/code>” are considered to be equivalent.<\/p>\n\n
Case Preserving<\/h3>\n
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Non-Case Preserving<\/h3>\n
Fixed Style<\/h4>\n
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Dictionary Definition<\/h4>\n
Last Use<\/h4>\n
Asymmetric Case Sensitivity<\/h2>\n
foo<\/code>” it would match “foo<\/code>“, “Foo<\/code>” or “FOO<\/code>“- it is case-insensitive.<\/p>\nFoo<\/code>” – the user has gone to the effort of specifying that some letters are upper-case, then it will only match “Foo<\/code>” and not “foo<\/code>” or “FOO<\/code>“.<\/p>\nfoo<\/code>“) and user-friendliness issues (it is difficult to work out that this will be the behaviour), but in practice, for an experienced user, it can prove to be quite natural.<\/p>\n\n
Miscellaneous Pedantic Notes:<\/h2>\n
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