Case sensitivity

Text sometimes exhibits case sensitivity, that is, words can differ in meaning based on the the differing use of uppercase and lowercase letters. Words with capital letters don't always have the same meaning as words with lowercase letters. For example, Bill is the name of a politician (Clinton) who signs a bill (which is a proposed law put before a legislature).

When a computer compares two words to decide whether they are equal, it may or may not consider words equal which only differ in case.

This is relevant e.g. with regard to:

• user names[?]
• passwords
• commands
• variable names
• when the user applies a search function to search for a text string

Some computer languages are case sensitive (Java, C++), while others are case insensitive (Visual Basic). Often, computer passwords are case sensitive and computer "user names" are not, which can be confusing for the naive user[?]. Passwords are often made case sensitive to make them harder to guess, whereas making usernames harder to guess or remember is not an advantage.

It takes more work for a program to ignore case when comparing data. Although it's easy enough when dealing when English text coded in character sets like ASCII or EBCDIC, it becomes far more challenging in a multi-lingual environment, e.g., using Unicode, since case-conversion rules differ between languages.