From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,8d472879e3f609e0 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-06-04 07:11:24 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!nntp.abs.net!uunet!dca.uu.net!ash.uu.net!spool0901.news.uu.net!spool0902.news.uu.net!not-for-mail Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 10:11:07 -0400 From: Hyman Rosen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030529 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Case sensitivity (was Re: no title) References: <20619edc.0306021018.6ee4dd09@posting.google.com> <1054649187.11497@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> <20619edc.0306031034.6a2f5f25@posting.google.com> <1054666439.685312@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: KBC Financial Products Message-ID: <1054735867.264510@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> Cache-Post-Path: master.nyc.kbcfp.com!unknown@nightcrawler.nyc.kbcfp.com X-Cache: nntpcache 3.0.1 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/) NNTP-Posting-Host: 204.253.250.10 X-Trace: 1054735868 13756 204.253.250.10 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:38602 Date: 2003-06-04T10:11:07-04:00 List-Id: 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.