Once upon a time this was a sensible question. Character sets such as EBCDIC and ASCII were designed so that everything could be shifted or unshifted by unsetting or setting a bit in the binary code. For example, in the original ASCII, unsetting the 32 bit not only shifts from 'a' to 'A', but also from ';' to '['. Unfortunately it is unclear why it happened, whether the ASCII convention itself contains not even a single technical provision (just a long featureless vomit of impreganable legalese) or because the whole idea got overlooked when a plethora of nastily unpredictable keyboards started arriving in front of us intended to support different languages or whatever (just an excuse for incompetence - there was no need to botch ASCII). Nor is it clear whether the technical standards behind ASCII (probably an IEEE standard actually) was just Microshafted and/or IBuMmered as well, but suffice to say the concept of a shift key got severely corrupted with total loss of consistency and Perl, which came to be after the Great IBM/Microsoft Disaster had only the bare bones left to pick through, hence the whole concept of case for Perl being limited to alpha only.

Update: actually in a way the ASCII ctrl key survived more than the shift key! (for example CTRL-C is "C" with the 64 bit unset = ascii 3) and that is more consistently implemented on keyboards, probably because the hordes of typists from all over the world didn't actually use it to type a letter on IBM word processors, so it remained unIBuMerred until it was later Microshafted: I.e. in another sense it didn't, for example, CTRL-C (ascii-cancel) while surviving to some extent on Unix and Linux won't work the same way under Windows. Unfortunately, the ASCII ctrl key is partially impaired on *Nix owing to the attempt to make e.g. Open Office transparent for the ex-Windows user. (ALT-C would have been a better idea for "copy" in regard to preserving the existing standards for keyboards).

-M

Free your mind

In reply to Re: Making a regex case insensitive by Moron
in thread Making a regex case insensitive by Win

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.