Compiler fails to detect nonexistent package with name differing only by case

The following illegal program is accepted by javac:

import java.awt.Event.*;
public class Foo {}

This example is similar to the following legal program:

import java.awt.event.*;
public class Foo {}

Note that there does exist a package 'java.awt.event', but not
a package 'java.awt.Event'. It is significant that there exists
a *class* named 'java.awt.Event' -- similar programs for which this
is not the case are properly rejected (see 257802).

If event/Event is replace by font/Font or color/Color, the bug is
also observed.

A similar example also appeared in bug 4180228. There, the problem
in JDK 1.1 was specific to the win32 platform and was not observed
when the core classes were obtained from a .zip file, indicating that
the problem there was related to case-insensitive filesystem name
lookup on win32. In the present case, the problem is observed on both
win32 and Solaris, whether the core classes are in a .jar archive or
the host filesystem.

william.maddox@Eng 2000-02-01