Case sensitivity (was Re: browse keys (@bk))

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 11:56:26AM -0400, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> "Jay R. Ashworth" wrote:
> [...]
> > True.  But while the difference between Forth and C *is* similar to the
> > difference between English and, say, Mandarin, my estimation is that
> > filePro falls in the "common procedural" category, the same way that
> > Spanish falls in the "common Romance" category: I *do* expect a fair
> > degree of commonality between filePro and basic/cobol/pascal/c/perl/python
> > ... and *none* of those smash case without warning or documentation.
> 
> On the other hand, *none* of those are DBMS languages.
> 
> On the other other hand, a quick check with MS Access and MS-SQL (which,
> I readily admit, are not the be-all and end-all in the DBMS market, but
> they have the advantage of being installed on my system) shows that they
> behave just like filePro does.  Sorting and comparisons are not case
> sensitive.  "BRONX", "Bronx", and "bronx" all appear when I ask for
> "Bronx", and they all appear intermingled when sorting by county.

"What do you expect from a database language designed in Redmond?"

(For the uninitiated, the root of the joke is the pejorative question
"What do you expect from an operating system designed in New Jersey?",
which was, of course, spoken by Bezerkeley people about AT&T Unix in the
seventies.)

> [...]
> > > For the record, I've been working for Small and .... and ... and
> > > fPTechnologies since 1988, when I wrote the browse lookup code, and I'm
> > > not sure I would have made the same decisions that the earlier
> > > programmers (Ken among them) made with respect to language design or
> > > code organization but I respect them and their skills enough to know
> > > that those decisions were made by extremely intelligent and highly
> > > skilled programmers.
> > 
> > Administar.  And I don't remember the other one, either.
> 
> "Personix, a Fiserv company."

Ah yes.

> (And, as I understand it, our parent company didn't change over the
> years.  It was the parent's parent that kept moving.)

Administar and Personix, in turn, bought Small?  And then Small finally
died and fpTech owns it assets?

> [...]
> > And, see?  I'm capable of having a nice, professional, level-headed
> > conversation about the issues.
> 
> :-)

Nice to know someone thinks it's funny.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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	"You know: I'm a fan of photosynthesis as much as the next guy,
	but if God merely wanted us to smell the flowers, he wouldn't 
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					-- Luke Girardi