Sunday, September 27, 2009

Vim pr0n: ignorecase fails

Fuck The Machine, lately the only thing I've been raging against is the ignorecase option.

In practice, the only use for ignorecase is to make vims regular expressions case insensitive when searching. However, for some reason, it also affects the == operator. Check this shit out:


:set noignorecase
:echo "foo" == "FOO"
0
:set ignorecase
:echo "foo" == "FOO"
1


What the fuck!? Good job team, you just made == ambiguous, and therefore completely useless.

This means script writers can't use == unless they explicity set the ignorecase option first, otherwise they don't know how their code will behave. Since that would be retarded, we should all stop using == and start using ==# or ==?, which is exactly what I've done.

But wait! Theres more! ignorecase also changes the behaviour of these comparison operators too:
!=
>
>=
<
<=
=~
!~

Who the fuck made this decision?! I have no idea, but Id like 5 minutes alone with that bitch so I could stab them in the face! Multiple times! WITH MY FUCKING RECTUM.

Just ask yourself: if you download someones vim script, is it really in your best interests to change how every single comparison operator in that script functions?

In my massively non-humble opinion, ignorecase should not affect any of the basic comparison operators, only specializations of those operators.

</rage>