From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Sat Apr 14 2001 - 15:26:29 CDT
On 13 Apr 2001, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Does not follow. It's quite conceivable to have software that is
> > optimized for the typical case, but can handle the more general case...
>
> Is there any widely deployed news software that does this? INN doesn't;
> it just always does a case-insensitive comparison.
We talked about it for C News, but I don't think we ever actually did it.
> Given the other
> constraints of a news server and the speed of modern processors, I don't
> think that the difference would even be noticeable...
News servers are not the only things that parse news articles, and we
found on C News that persistent attention to such seemingly-small details
could make quite large differences in performance.
My concern is not so much that there's an obvious big win there, but that
it costs us very little to leave the option open, and it might someday be
useful. Pointing to a preferred form would also discourage pointless
variation in capitalization.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net