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From: rosenkra@convex.com (William Rosencranz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: case insensitivity in TOS
Message-ID: <1991Jan30.181951.2045@convex.com>
Date: 30 Jan 91 18:19:51 GMT
References: <1991Jan12.023029.20022@convex.com> <7340070@hpfcso.HP.COM>
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In article <7340070@hpfcso.HP.COM> mjs@hpfcso.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella) writes:
>This coming from a guy who doesn't even capitalize the first word of his
>sentences :-?

hey, it made e. e. cummings a star :-)

>Well, some applications, upon finding the feature, might insist on using it,
>and not leaving it up to the user.  Someone might write an application that
>creates internal data files named "foo" and "FoO" and requires them to be
>distinct.

No. A well written application will test the tos version and bypass this.
a poorly written application will not, but then these are not even guaranteed
to run on any os other than what it was developed on (i.e. "undocumented"
variables, locations, etc which apratt wisely warns us about). so why
even bother keeping the guys who write lousy code in business by buying
their products? i am sure DC/Beckmeyer/et al would not be around if they
were not careful, and did not write good code. let the market decide.

>Realistically, this can probably be avoided, but the point is, it is not a
>given that people will be able turn the feature off just because it is made
>optional.

People WILL be able to turn it on/off. right from the desktop or with a 10
line (trivial) application. the system can be booted with feature disabled.
the only thing i can think of which may break is if the state is saved to
DESKTOP.INF and u try using the new version .inf on an older tos. this may
be analogous to the blitter state. what happens in that case? will tos 1.0
die when reading a tos 1.2 .inf, if the blitter state is saved in the file?

it sounds like u think that adding new features to an OS is bad, since
new applications which use them will not run on older systems (unless
they are well written - see above). so why even bother upgrading an OS?
and u can get TOS upgrades (i.e. Rainbow TOS). infact, why even bother
getting new equipment 20 years from now? today's software won't run on
it in all likelihood. and what about things like MiNT, a really nice
piece of work. MiNT applications will not run without MiNT (essentially
an OS upgrade). the only difference here is that MiNT does not cost
anything. a bona fide TOS upgrade may cost $100, if that.

note that i realize that a disk saved with mixed case file names may be
impossible to read on an older TOS. in that case, it should be up to the
purveyor of the disk to decide how it should be written. if it is
commercial s/w, then it is marketing decision. many, many programs do
not run on 520s. that does not make them bad programs. it just means that
for people to use them, they must have the correct hardware/OS. and people
buy (or at least should, in most cases) computers because of the software
they want to use.

i REALLY don't want to talk about this anymore. i know it is 1) feasible,
2) won't really break anything (at least i have not heard any convincing
arguments), so the point is now moot and really up to atari.

-bill
rosenkra@convex.com
--
Bill Rosenkranz            |UUCP: {uunet,texsun}!convex!c1yankee!rosenkra
Convex Computer Corp.      |ARPA: rosenkra%c1yankee@convex.com