One thing came to me about case sensitive collations, is the readability of code. Sure, you can do whatever case you want in insensitive collations, but if you want to ENFORCE the style of programming text, then case sensitive collations makes sense.

About zero based indexing, I wouldn't call it a unixism, starting your indexes at 1 is a convenience offered to programmers who would rather code that way in my opinion. Arrays in actuality are often implemented using base addresses and offsets, and behind the scenes if you use 1 based indexing, any index must be decreased by 1 internally anyways or else the first position would go unused (which is probably no biggy). Programming languages with indexes that start at 1 really aren't all that operating system specific. When I was writing assembler for CP/M, there were the same addresses and offsets, so I'm going to hazard a guess that Phil is confusing operating systems with programming languages.

2 cents!