Re: Case sensitivity on the LHS

[Martin Duerst <duerst@xxxxxx>]

At 15:21 03/02/10 +0100, Magnus Bodin wrote:

> It might not make any sense in English with ASCII [A-Za-z]. In a
> different language with a different pair of upper/lower-case characters,
> it might be a bigger difference between a upper/lower/mixed-case word.

This is a point to consider. However, the differences between
upper/lower/mixed-case words usually apply to the actual language
(e.g. nouns vs. verbs,...), not to names. This is certainly the case
in German.

In various European languages, there are individual differences of
how to spell names with prefixes (e.g. French 'de' or 'du', Dutch
'van', German 'von', ...). German is not special in this respect.

There are not only casing variants, but also whether there is a
space or not (e.g. 'du Bois' vs. 'Du Bois' vs. 'duBois' vs. 'DuBois'
vs. 'Dubois', not all of them necessarily in use). We kind of know
that we cannot deal with the space. So half of the distinctions
in this area are already lost, and it becomes impossible to
completely and faithfully reflect personal spelling differences
to the last detail. In that case, it seems better to just
go all the way to case-insensitivity.

Regards,    Martin.