palordrolap , 5 hours ago

Thought experiment: Would you expect a programming language variable name to be case insensitive?

That is, if you set foo = 1 and then print FOO, what should happen? Most programming languages throw an error.

Is this even comparable with filenames, which are, after all, basically variable names that hold large quantities of data?

If there is a difference, is it the fact it's a file, or - for a mad idea - should files with only a few bytes of data retain case insensitivity? And if that idea is followed through, where's the cutoff? 256 bytes? 7?

(Anyway, Windows filenames are case sensitive, in a sense. If you save "Letter to Grandma.txt" it will retain those two capital letters and all the lower case letters exactly as they are. It won't suddenly change to "LETTER to Grandma.txt", despite the fact that if you try to open a file by that name, you'll get the same file.)