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Posted by tony on 12/22/05 18:24
>> No, I'm asking you. What problem existed in the case-insensitive world
>> that could ONLY be solved by introducing case-sensitivity?
> Many many years ago it was done for compiler performance reasons. It
> does require lots of extra cycles to lower-case every single
> identifier in a large C application.
On all the hardware I have worked on for the past 30 years the extra
processing cycles for performng case-insensitive searches was never
deemed to be significant. Certainly not important enough to remove the
ability for case-insensitive searches.
If it was done in the C compiler then I can only surmise that the C
compiler was written by idiots.
> Might seem like a poor reason now, but as a COBOL/Mainframe programmer
> should appreciate it -- It was only 2 extra bytes to store the entire
> year but somebody decided that was too much.
Back in those days it was the enormous cost of data storage that made
people store years in 2 bytes instead of 4. But nobody even thought of
reducing processing cycles by eliminating case-insensitive searches as
the loss of that functionality was deemed too great.
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