&gt; &quot;writing can be very weird&quot;<p>Absolutely! I think there&#x27;s a lot of baggage in computing because it happened to emerge in places where language could mostly be written in simple characters with surprisingly simple rules. When exported internationally suddenly you deal with &quot;oddities&quot; that are really rather the norm in other languages.<p>In French for example is customary NOT to put accents on capital letters, even though it&#x27;s possible. But then again sometime people do it anyway - it&#x27;s not a hard rule. So often converting to lowercase may require contextual understanding because some words are written the same but with different accents, and would capitalize to the same string. Which word was meant would only be evident from the context of the sentence.<p>I suspect that if computing had rather developed somewhere where these things were commonplace we would have much better handling of it today.