Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.dal.ca!silvert
From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: case insensitivity in TOS
Summary: shouldn't be hard
Message-ID: <1991Jan15.141034.24275@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 15 Jan 91 14:10:34 GMT
References: <1991Jan12.023029.20022@convex.com> <2807@atari.UUCP>
Sender: silvert@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (Bill Silvert)
Reply-To: bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 26

In article <2807@atari.UUCP> apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt) writes:
>rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosencranz) writes:
>>is there any inherent reason why future TOS versions can't be case
>>sensitive [...?]
>
>The quick answer is this: GEMDOS was that way originally because MS-DOS
>is that way, and GEMDOS is still that way because it was that way
>originally.

I suspect that the tradition goes back to CP/M and the use of teletypes.
But with CP/M it was easy to change -- there was a masking operation
that converted lower case to upper case, and I just changed that to NOP
(no-op) and had a full case sensitive cp/m.  Interestingly enough,
Microsoft BASIC could create lower-case file names which could not then
be removed with CP/M commands!

With TOS in rom the hack would be harder, but since it is possible to
get all kinds of odd characters in file names by various errors, why
can't a case-sensitive version of TOS be generated?


-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
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