python 2.7.12 on Linux behaving differently than on Windows

[BartC]

On 09/12/2016 00:55, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 10:19 AM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:

>> So it it perfectly possible to have case conversion defined for English,
>> while other alphabets can do what they like.
>
> Aaaaand there we have it. Not only do you assume that English is the
> only thing that matters, you're happy to give the finger to everyone
> else on the planet.

I haven't given the finger to anybody. I'm not an expert on all these 
other languages, but I don't want to tell them what to do either. /They/ 
decide what meaning upper/lower has, if any.

Or maybe we can just do away with it altogether. (What are Python's 
.lower/.upper used for, after all? With any such functions, you are 
guaranteed to find a Unicode sequence which is going to give trouble. So 
take them out so as not to offend anyone!)

It does seem however as though users of other languages are telling /me/ 
how I should deal with English, which is what I spend nearly 100% of my 
life dealing with (those language lessons not having worked out...).

>
>> It is a little ridiculous however to have over two thousand distinct files
>> all with the lower-case normalised name of "harry_potter".
>
> It's also ridiculous to have hundreds of files with unique two-letter
> names, but I'm sure someone has done it. The file system shouldn't
> stop you

With a case-sensitive file system, how do you search only for 'harry', 
not knowing what combinations of upper and lower case have been used? 
(It's a good thing Google search isn't case sensitive!)

> What were we talking about again? Oh yes, belittling me because I work with
>> Windows!
>
> Or because you don't understand anything outside of what you have
> worked with, and assume that anything you don't understand must be
> inferior. It's not a problem to not know everything, but you
> repeatedly assert that other ways of doing things are "wrong", without
> acknowledging that these ways have worked for forty years and are
> strongly *preferred* by myriad people around the world. I grew up on
> OS/2, using codepage 437 and case insensitive file systems, and there
> was no way for me to adequately work with other Latin-script
> languages,

I developed applications that needed to work in French, German and 
Dutch, apart from English. That might have been long enough ago that I 
may have had to provide some of the fonts (both bitmap and vector), as 
well as implement suitable keyboard layouts used with digitising 
tablets. /And/ provide support in the scripting languages that went with 
them.

Not particularly demanding in terms of special or quirky characters (or 
word-order issues when constructing messages for translation) but it's 
not quite the same as my assuming everything was 7-bit ASCII and in English.

  much less other European languages (Russian, Greek), and
> certainly I had no way of working with non-alphabetic languages
> (Chinese, Japanese). Nor right-to-left languages (Hebrew, Arabic).

Did you really need to work with all those languages, or is this a 
generic 'I'.

-- 
Bartc