As part of my dilemma with working on Windows, case-sensitivity comes into play.

Windows is case insensitive. That is, "This" is the same as "this" to the file system. No matter which way you type it, you'll get the same file, with Windows working hard to maintain the original case you used. That means that sometimes Windows won't even let you rename "This" to "this" if you need to; you have to rename "This" to "that" and then "that" to "this" as a workaround.

All other operating systems are case sensitive. Therefore, "This" and "this" could both exist in the same directory on the file system. Additionally, because the file system is case sensitive, references made to the file know and care about the difference. This allows us to directly replace "This" with "this" and not have to jump through other hoops.

This introduces occasional hiccups when developing on Windows and deploying on another OS. This was my case yesterday. I had created a file incorrectly labeled like "SOMEthing" but in the scripts referred to it as "SomeThing" internally. This worked fine on Windows, but did not on Solaris.

Worse still, since the file was checked into a Windows-friendly version control suite (the icky ClearCase), renaming the file didn't help as the version control didn't see the difference either, and it, too, maintained the original case of the file name.

I had to replace all of the otherwise stylistically correct references to the incorrect version on the file system.

Whoops.