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Why on God's (or anyone else's) green earth (or equivalent living quarters) do people ignore the fact that English has more than one case and write everything in lower case? I mean, are we using teletypes still? Are these languages invented by ee cummings? Do these people write in all lower case anywhere else in life?
also || while i'm on a roll -> why on earth would anyone creating a language these days :?i'm talking to you rust:? choose to use such an alphabet soup instead of making it more readable{} i mean c++ has an excuse, but a new language doesn't.
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I mostly see angry racists using all upper case.
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THAT BCOZ U GOIN 2 WRONG SITEZZZ!!! 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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LOL!!! We have an election coming up and the big one is TAKE A BLACK PEN SO THE GOVERNMENT CAN'T CHANGE YOUR VOTE!!!
Because a corrupt government would still never lie about what the votes said
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HerIsSomeCamelCaseToGetYouByUntilMoreCapsComeAlong. 
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i prefer all lower case, uses less energy.
(exception for microsoft - lowercase on purpose - scumbags deserve such lowered recognition in 'appreciation' of their achievements in stifling progress in IT.)
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... But contain more '1' bits, so they are bad for the environment, as well as being heavier to ship round the internet all the time so wasting "Internet Energy". You probably need a Crystal to heal that, or some better Website Feng Shui.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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lopati: roaming wrote: i prefer all lower case, uses less energy.
FxCop would state that UC is more efficient for some comparisons.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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i dont understand what you mean the griff is prolly rite u visit stoopid sites
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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In many Western languages, like German and Norwegian/Danish in the 19th century, capatalized all nouns. The shift key really got some exercize in those days!
In Norwegian / Danish, we abandoned that (and I suspect that Germans are considering abandoning it nowadays, but ask a German about that!). It didn't reduce readability a lot! Nor do we capitalize weekdays, or nationalities like english or norwegian, or holidays like easter and christmas. We capitalize names of individuals, organizations, nations and geographical locations, and the first word of a sentence, but not much more. I don't really see the benefit of that extra capitalizing I have to do when switching to English - "english" is just as readable as "English".
I might support capitalizing the start of sentences, to emphasize the structure of the text - a sentence is a structural element. Sure, the full stop ending the previous sentence also does that, and that is why I say that i "might". Logically, it is redundant, but the extra emphasis may have some value (similar to many programing languages where you both bracket and indent a subclause, loop body etc.). I see no similar structural argument for capitalizing weekdays and nationalities, or even individual names.
For names, you might argue that capitalizing is a sign of honor, similar to the difference between "you" and "You" in English. In Norwegian, "you" is "du", and "You" is "De" (always capitalized) - but noone uses "De" nowadays. I think we could abandon it completely, and limit capitalization of person names to cases where we really want to express honor and respect, like when you address the king, you use 3rd person.
Many non-Western languages have a single case, faring quite well.
I really see no reason for using upper case more than we do. You may construct examples where casing might reduce ambiguity, but there are a lot more and a lot graver ambguities from other language mechanisms. "You should use more upper case, simply because uppercase is there for you to use!" is not a good argument. Certainly not when e.g. Norwegian shows that far less use of it causes no problems.
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Member 7989122 wrote: and I suspect that Germans are considering abandoning it nowadays, but ask a German about that!
I am not German but I am living in Germany... In my experience... no. They are not considering it at all.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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And of course it's not really meaningful to draw comparisons with prose. Software isn't prose, though I do find my own code quite poetic if I do say so myself (and apparently I just did.) To me it's really about recognizing identifiers in a sea of punctuation, and quickly differentiating them from the background for readability, not about the actual words themselves.
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Quote: "english" is just as readable as "English".
...but have two different meanings.
"english" means to add spin or side pressure during certain physical actions, such as when playing pool or throwing a ball, etc.
"English" means either the English language or the English people as a group.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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As I wrote, "You may construct examples where casing might reduce ambiguity, but there are a lot more and a lot graver ambguities from other language mechanisms".
Sure, a given spelling (even disregarding casing) may have more than one interpretation. (And along with that: maybe a different pronounciation - one of my hobbies is to collect Norwegian homographs with different pronounciation, for seeing how good speech synthesizers are at selecting the right interpretation from context.)
Even though "english" and "English" have two meanings: Can you provide an example of a complete sentence where the context does not provide enough information to select the right meaning, so that the sentence (as a whole) have two different meanings?
In my collection of a couple hundred Norwegian homographs (limited to those with multpiple pronounciations), I have only been able to make up two or three examples of sentences that can have two different meanings based on the ambiguity of the spelled word. I doubt that it would be much easier in English, especially when you limit yourself to words with different casing.
Lots of jokes are based on a given word having several meanings, but independent of casing and with identical pronounciation. That is not what we are talking about here!
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Fair point. The only example I could come up with is not politely publishable, so no.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Capitalization of the first word of a sentence was added when the printing press came in, because punctuation was sparse at best then, and even if used the period was hard to see - a capital letter marked the start of a sentence much more readably. (Prior to this, Old English had no distinction between upper and lower case letters, so nothing was accentuated unless it was the decorated letter that started a page).
Even now, a capital letter is easier to spot than a teeny tiny dot!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I find it far more annoying when someone capitalizes the first letter of every single word. I can't understand how someone would think that is something they should do.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Given that case is the noun's equivalent of verb inflection, I should comment that English doesn't really have case (sort-of, but not really -- plural and genitive don't quite reach the mark).
However, I have the feeling that you might be talking about major and minor case -- in which case, you should have a chat with Skitt.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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"Major and minor case" - what is that? Are you referring to ordinary capitals vs. small capitals?
In Norwegian, we call "upper" and "lower" case "big" and "small" letters ("store" and "små" in Norwegian), but I have never before seen them referred to as "major" and "minor" in English. Is that something else?
The terms upper and lower case came with lead type: The setters had a row of boxes with A to Z lead types (and I suppose non-letters following the 26 letter boxes), and then a second row of boxes with a to z lead types, below the A to Z types: 'A' in the upper box, 'a' in the lower box immediately below it.
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"Maiuscolo" and "minisculo" (meaning major and minor) are the etymological source of the correct grammatical terms.Member 7989122 wrote: The terms upper and lower case came with lead type: The setters had a row of boxes with A to Z lead types (and I suppose non-letters following the 26 letter boxes), and then a second row of boxes with a to z lead types, below the A to Z types: 'A' in the upper box, 'a' in the lower box immediately below it.
This is wonderfully true, because it's a superb example of how jargon phrases/terms get added to common usage in a language; and it's good that you've spread that knowledge here.
But major and minor are still the "correct" terms, even if they're not used anywhere as near as much.
It's like medical terms. Who the Hell calls the common cold anything other than "the common cold"?
(Tip: the answer to the question contains the words "medical" and "experts", often in that order)
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I call them Fred.
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BTW, anyone is interested in such things should watch the excellent documentary "Helvetica" which is a history of that ubiquitous type face and parenthetically of type faces in general.
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Dean Roddey wrote: people ignore the fact that English has more than one case and write everything in lower case
Well...in all fairness, if someone's not going to bother to use proper capitalization, I'd much rather read something all in lowercase than all in uppercase. You've gotta pick your battles. I'll settle for this.
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I have my own startup and am facing the problem of managing firm's documents. I have so many documents: Letters to individuals or other firms, Contracts, Technical documents, etc. I have different folders for different categories: Letters, Docs & Projects, Finance, Law Docs, etc. The problem is, I frequently forget which document belongs to which category an fall into endless problem of folder search. I have decided to use tagging system instead of storing files into categorized folder. Is this a good idea and do you know of any software that simply does this?
I have Win7 inside a vm and the guest is Linux. I prefer a Windows software.
Behzad
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