A report from the documentation maintainer

You continue to go on about character encoding, which has nothing to do with this. I don't fully understand why you keep bringing it up. If you byte sort purely english language text using UTF-8 encoding it's exactly the same as byte sorting purely english text using ASCII encoding. But real people don't want their output byte sorted, they want it sorted in a way that's sensible to them.

> The fact that the user wants to see messages in English (or whatever language) and use UTF-8 for character encoding should not be taken to imply that they want to change the way the shell expands glob patterns.

Clearly it should, that's the reality. You want a different reality than one which we inhabit. It's also a good thing that people who use languages other than english can use character classes which include characters from their language, which they couldn't do in the 1980s. And if you still want 1980s semantics, tada, they're still there by turning a knob.

> Shell is a user interface in the same sense as any programming language: a user interface designed for use by programmers. It's ridiculous to claim that it isn't a programming language, since significant fraction of the programs on most Unix systems are written in it. By percentage of commands executed it's a programming language first, with interactive use as a distant second.

Most system commands are now written in other, better languages. The majority of people using a unix command line today interact via the shell but don't program using it. That's for the best. In my bin & sbin right now I have:
1236 compiled
238 shell
163 perl
83 bash
71 python
11 ruby
1 tcl
1 php

Looking at the shell scripts they're mostly either trivial, or at least 15 years old. 100 of them are less than 50 lines. A couple are cheats, only using the shell to launch some other interpreter. As far as I can tell from a quick glance, none of them use the critical "remove-files-with-a-glob-character-class" capability you're so stuck on. The longest are 1-2k LOC and date from the early to mid 90s. So yeah, some people program in it, mostly trivial scripts which avoid dealing with corner cases, and mostly as a legacy capability. I stand by my assertion that the majority of users' interaction with the shell is as an interface with some automation capabilities. I suspect that was always true, and that the number of people who copied around cool snippits of .profile was much higher than the number of people who actually created them (that's certainly my recollection of the cs lab).

> What do you think this thread was about? This "better language" you suggest is shell, as it existed before glob patterns became locale-aware and thus context-dependent and dangerously unpredictable.

I have no idea what this thread is about at this point. You keep bringing up character encodings for some reason, and asserting that the shell is something other than what it actually is. I started the thread with the assertion that upper casing filenames to make them come first is something that's pretty irrelevant to anyone except a few wild-eyed people who haven't kept up with the reality of modern systems and then you proceeded to demonstrate my point. Yeah, some tricks that worked 30 years ago don't work anymore (like uppercasing filenames to make them come first). New things have come along that most people are pretty happy about (I'm personally happy taking advantage of the fact that I can run interpreters and libraries that aren't constrained by 1970s or 80s era hardware limitations). You can either continue to complain that things changed or acknowledge that today's user has a different experience from one 30 years ago and do things in a way that make sense in a modern context.