One more story from yesterday’s marathon debugging session. At one point, we were using RegFind to search the registry for badly registered COM interfaces. I was working on a branch, and we thought that old executables from my trunk build might still be registered. I used a command like this:
$ regfind -y ned\trunk\bin\
to find if any stuff from my trunk build was registered in the registry. The -y flag means search case-insensitively. When nothing turned up, our Windows expert said to also search with forward slashes since .NET uses them in paths when registering. So I did this:
$ regfind -y ned/trunk/bin/
and we found some registry entries.
Wouldn’t it have been cool if the -y flag also meant that “\” and “/” are equivalent? In VMS, the shell was case-insensitive, and as I recall, it considered “-” and “_” as equivalent. Case insensitivity usually only means that letters should be paired for equivalence, but why?
Comments
A language I was looking at a while ago (http://blog.colorstudy.com/ianb/weblog/2004/01/26.html#P58) wasn't just case-insensitive with identifiers, but also ignored _'s, being more stylistically insensitive (i.e., TwoWords, two_words, TWO_WORDS and twoWords were all equivalent).
That regfind utility looks cool, but some of us cheapskates out here didn't buy the CD. You can dl a bunch of nice freebie tools from ms
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/default.asp
but so far I don't think regfind is one of them. I'd love to be proved wrong, but what the heck, it would make a nice project, eh?
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