Message-Id: <v03100c2aaef31abc0720@[205.214.160.110]>
In-Reply-To: <19970103192335.3629.qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu>
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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1997 12:40:32 -0800
To: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@koobera.math.uic.edu>
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Subject: Re: case sensitivity
Cc: drums@cs.utk.edu

At 11:23 AM -0800 1/3/97, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
>Nice thought. How do you specify that in ABNF?

	a small point that is usually missed is that bnf really specifies
parsing rules.  it happens that the san jose drums discussion agreed that
"..." strings would mean 'case independent' and that case-dependent strings
would be specified one character at a time.  hence, we don't even have to
resort to meta-specification (i.e., prose).

>Anyway, it's inaccurate to say ``commands are coerced to upper case.''
>It's accurate to say ``command names are coerced to upper case''; I'm

	well, I suspect the precise reference is 'command string'.

>proposing to migrate away from this requirement.

	yes, it's clear that that is your proposal.  the only problem is
that it really isn't worth the operational pain the change would cause
(IMO, of course)

>You're the one who wrote, in RFC 822 section 3.4.7, that ``case is to be
>ignored'' except for ``ctext'' and various other items.

	no doubt it's just me, but i tend to think of 'ignoring' something
as being different from being 'sensitive' to it.

>I'm simply observing that ``ctext'' is one of the exceptions.

	well, it's certainly true that one should preserve a comment
exactly, if one preserves it at all.

>> "transition" protocol.  what does that mean?
>
>It means: ``both sides must obey the new rules; both sides must obey the
>old rules during the transition.''

	Ahh.  Then, yes, it's a 5-10 year process.  Possibly longer.
Transition is much, much longer than introduction to a void, and as we've
seen with MIME, introduct to a void takes on the order of 5 years when the
new mechanism is on top of an old one (rather than changing an old one).
The Web suggests that it's about 5 years for introduction to a pure void,
too.

>That's because everybody sends commands in uppercase.
>
>Any experienced programmer could have predicted in 1982 that this would

	really?  seems to me that mit and cmu programmers have tended to
violate that prediction for, perhaps, 20 years.  they were so enamored of
mixed case that they imposed it all over the place.

>Why haven't you been objecting, on the same grounds, to every new
>restriction that DRUMS has imposed?

	too little time.  too many objections.  (c) 1997

	one does what one can.

d/

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