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why???
Authored by: j-beda on Jan 21, '04 09:03:53PM
"It may be unintuitive, but it wasn't designed to be. It was designed for utility and function, not form. Putting this in Mac OS Extended means a lot of us can junk UFS (Unbelievably Farkin Slow!) and move to a more native format."

I think it wasn't designed for "utility and function" but rather "ease of implementation". It is much more challenging to build case awareness and insensitivity than it is to build case sensitivity. Since upper/lower case characters are encoded differently, case sensitivity in the file system is automatic - autually getting case-insensitivity takes some real work.

The arguement that case sensitivity adds "utility and function" I think is a false one. The only reason for having a human readable file system in the first place is so that humans can interact with it, and humans generally do not have very strong "case sensitivity", particularly in spoken language. What case sensitivity does add is "legacy support", making it easier to transfer files and applications from systems that are case sensitive. Of course anyone who is writing software that depends on the use of different cases in filenames (file-a.dat and file-A.dat being different data files perhaps?) has serious issues with creating easy-to-maintain code. The extra "flexibility" of a case-sensitive system in my opinion is offset by one that has much more potential errors.

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