Because usability. If you have the files downdown1down2downxyz and download and the user only knows that it was “something with down” it’s best to show the user everything matching “down*” and let the user decide what’s the correct one.
Also I’m not sure but wouldn’t your expression show everything if only one character would be entered?
And again I don’t see this solving anything if the entered string actually contains other characters then what’s in the file (D != d)
Yes one could argue that some form of advanced algorithm or even AI could be used to identify such use case like download and Download but this is programming Humor, not linguisic Humor.
down
matchesdown*
because*
also includes empty string. Alsodownload
matchesdown*
D
matchesD*
butd
is not matchingD*
becauseD
is a different character thand
.but why do we have to match specifically against
substr*
? it’s not a law of nature, we could also match against the regex(?i)substr(?-i).*
not saying that one option is necessarily better, but I don’t see a good reason for which any one of these options would be terrible
Because usability. If you have the files
down
down1
down2
downxyz
anddownload
and the user only knows that it was “something with down” it’s best to show the user everything matching “down*” and let the user decide what’s the correct one.Also I’m not sure but wouldn’t your expression show everything if only one character would be entered?
And again I don’t see this solving anything if the entered string actually contains other characters then what’s in the file (
D
!=d
)Yes one could argue that some form of advanced algorithm or even AI could be used to identify such use case like download and Download but this is programming Humor, not linguisic Humor.