From: Farley Flud <ff@linux.rocks>
Subject: Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
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Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:04:49 +0000
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On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:11:19 +0200, Andreas Dehmel wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:56:18 +0000
> Farley Flud <ff@linux.rocks> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:12:42 -0700, John Ames wrote:
>> 
>> > 
>> > Just so, it seems to me. Of course it's many years too late for
>> > *nix to course-correct on this, but it was a stupid design decision
>> > in 1970 and it remains stupid now. Well, such is the nature of
>> > things in this vale of sin and tears...
>> >  
>> 
>> Case insensitivity was only idiotic at the beginning, but now, in the
>> age of Unicode, it is supremely idiotic.
>> 
>> Consider the German "sharp s," which I cannot enter as UTF-8 here.
>> 
>> But the lower case sharp s maps into TWO DIFFERENT upper case chars:
>> <can't enter> and "SS," e.g. STRASSE or <can't enter>.
> 
> That merely illustrates the point that whoever decided to model it like
> this in Unicode was truly a numbskull. For two reasons:
> 
> 1) just because the result _looks_ like SS doesn't mean it has to be
> two characters. A Unicode character can look like anything, even a full
> word (and beyond). The only reason to use two characters would be
> hyphenation, which in this case is explicitly forbidden. Someone didn't
> understand the difference between syntax and semantics.
> 
> 2) this transformation is not trivially inversible. No, you can't just
> translate every SS back to ß, you'd pretty much need an AI to invert
> this. Whenever you're introducing a transformation that's trivial in
> one direction and extremely hard in the other, and you're not working
> in cryptography, you're doing something extremely, horribly wrong.
> 
> 
>> There are special rules on case folding for thousands of Unicode chars
>> and the "sharp s" example is one of the simplest.
> 
> I seriously doubt that, especially since many (most?) languages don't
> even know what "case" is supposed to be in the first place (such as
> Japanese, I'm pretty sure it's the same in Chinese and most other asian
> languages, which incidentally take up the most code points). And even
> if it were true, that'd mean we'd need a couple of thousand additional
> code points for these special cases, out of several million -- who
> cares, the gender-neutral-smileys-crowd?
> 

Thanks for your input.

I am not a native German speaker and I can only rely on web sites
to inform me of these issues.

But I don't quite get the thesis of your post.  Are you for or
against case insensitive filesystems?



-- 
Systemd: solving all the problems that you never knew you had.