Case-insensitive string equality

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2017 12:27 am, Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2017-09-03, Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>> Stefan Ram wrote:
>>>   But of
>>>   course, actually the rules of orthography require "Maße" or
>>>   "Masse" and do not allow "MASSE" or "MASZE", just as in
>>>   English, "English" has to be written "English" and not
>>>   "english" or "ENGLISH".
>>
>> While "english" is wrong in English, there's no rule
>> against using  "ENGLISH" as an all-caps version.
> 
> Perhaps there's no "rule" in your book of rules, but it's almost
> universally considered bad style and you will lose points with your
> teacher, editor, etc.

And yet editors frequently use ALL CAPS for book titles and sometimes even
chapter headings, as well as the author's name. I have a shelf full of books by
STEPHEN KING behind me.

Likewise for movie titles on DVDs, album titles on CDs, address labels (I'm
looking at a letter addressed to MR S DAPRANO right now), labels on food and
medication.

The late and much-lamented English humourist Sir Terry Pratchett wrote almost
forty books including the character of Death, who SPEAKS IN CAPITALS. (And his
superior, Azrael, does the same in letters almost the size of the entire page.
Fortunately he says only a single word in the entire series.)

Many government forms and databases require all caps, presumably because it is
easier for handwriting recognition, or maybe its just a left over from the days
of type writers.


> On the inter-tubes generally indicates you're shouting, or just a
> kook.  I guess if either of those is true, then it's good style.

It is true that in general we don't write ordinary prose in all caps, there are
plenty of non-kook uses for it. But speaking of capitals on the Internet:



<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key
<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> fuck me


http://bash.org/?835030


-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.