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Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 09:16:47 -0600
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To: Tony Marston <TonyMarston@hotmail.com>
Cc: internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Deprecate and remove case-insensitive constants?
From: levim@php.net (Levi Morrison)

On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 2:59 AM, Tony Marston <TonyMarston@hotmail.com> wrote:
> People who think that case sensitive software is cool are deluding
> themselves. When I started working on mainframe computers (UNIVAC and IBM)
> in the early 1970s everything was case-insensitive. This was only changed by
> people who did not understand the ramifications of their choice.

Actually there are concrete bugs caused by case insensitivity. For one
example, here is our own bugs.php.net report about a Turkish locale
issue:

    https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=18556

The short summary of the issue is that when capital `I`, the ninth
letter of the English alphabet, is lowercased in the Turkish locales
it does not become the same `i` as it does in English but a different
i that is not considered equal. Thus classes such as `Iterator` are
not found in the Turkish locales. Note that this bug was fixed, and
then there was a regression that lasted until PHP 5.5.

There are other case insensitivity bugs but this Turkish one is the
poster child and if you search around you can find many examples of
it.

Case sensitivity is thus *a correctness issue* and not a "cool"ness,
personal preference, performance, or some other type of issue. I argue
correctness and maintenance issues are the most important and thus if
we change sensitivity of *any* type of symbol it should go in the
direction of being case sensitive. Someone can disagree on what they
value but people who think case insensitivity is not a correctness
issue "are deluding themselves".

Levi Morrison