Ok, maybe this you will judge as something constructive: when the underlying medium is case-insensitive, your application cannot behave in a case-sensitive way. But frequently I care about case-sensitivity in my searches. I gave an example in my top-most comment: "us" vs "US". On the other hand, when the underlying medium is case-sensitive, the application can implement case-insensitivity on its own. I do it all the time. Sometimes I want to run "find . -name", sometimes "find . -iname", and the first one not because I forgot about the second.
> Reading replies here convinces me even more that you just picked 'something something windows' and react like a bull does to a red rag.
Completely missed. I appreciate a lot of design choices behind Windows and use it with pleasure. However, I judge this one aspect of it negatively. It's also a source of recurring problems with Git on Windows.
Windows itself has case-insensitivity largely for backwards-compatibility reasons (from the times of MS-DOS). The underlying filesystem (NTFS) itself is case-sensitive, it is the OS API that normalizes filenames, and is itself case-preserving, rather than case-insensitive, when it comes to writing files.
UPDATE: another point: I may want to have a directory with an image for every character of my alphabet with files named accordingly. With a case-insensitive filesystem I can't have an "a.svg" and an "A.svg" in the same directory.
> Reading replies here convinces me even more that you just picked 'something something windows' and react like a bull does to a red rag.
Completely missed. I appreciate a lot of design choices behind Windows and use it with pleasure. However, I judge this one aspect of it negatively. It's also a source of recurring problems with Git on Windows.
Windows itself has case-insensitivity largely for backwards-compatibility reasons (from the times of MS-DOS). The underlying filesystem (NTFS) itself is case-sensitive, it is the OS API that normalizes filenames, and is itself case-preserving, rather than case-insensitive, when it comes to writing files.
UPDATE: another point: I may want to have a directory with an image for every character of my alphabet with files named accordingly. With a case-insensitive filesystem I can't have an "a.svg" and an "A.svg" in the same directory.