Re: Case sensitivity (was Re: no title)

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Preben Randhol wrote:
> Of course there is reasons for it as have been itterated over and over.

People are certainly repeating reasons over and over,
nut I haven't seen any that hold water. The one that
seems to appear most often is that a word should mean
the same thing regardless of its case, because that
mimics natural language. That fails on two grounds,
first that in natural language, case does affect
meaning (eg., polish vs. Polish, Ada vs. ADA), and
second that in Ada, one word may be overloaded to
have several meanings.

Another reason claimed that Ada was designed so that
it could be developed in environments that didn't
support lower case development, but that fails since
Ada programs can contain lower-case string and character
literals which must be preserved.

The only legitimate reason I've seen is that insensitivity
to case allows people to alter the case of identifiers to
conform to local conventions regardless of how they are
declared in their source packages, in the same way that they
can change formatting conventions. It can be argued as to
how much of a benefit this actually is, but if this kind of
thing is allowed, Ada should also support the sprinkling of
underscores into identifiers without changing their meaning,
just as it does for numbers.