Re: Case sensitivity (was Re: no title)

[snarflemike@yahoo.com (Mike Silva)]

"Sergey Koshcheyev" <serko84@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<bbf9kl$7kt$1@ns.felk.cvut.cz>...
> 
> IMHO, case sensitivity would help ensure consistency of names, so you don't
> have Text_IO, Text_Io, text_io and TEXT_IO in the same program, and would
> also enable using common words like In, Out, For, At for identifiers. Things
> like GetString vs. getstring and others are better handled by using some
> coding standard and naming convention, in my opinion. Given that it's
> standard in Ada to use Identifiers_Like_This, I think case sensitivity
> wouldn't do any harm.

Going back to first principles, different case does not change the
meaning of words (at least in English!).  Cup and cup and CUP are all
the same.  I'm sure it was only a matter of laziness or a desire for
greater speed that caused case sensitivity to be included in many
languages.  In either case, they broke the rules of language meaning
by causing Cup and cup and CUP to be different things.  The question
is, do you *really* need Cup and cup and CUP to be different?  I know
it's a common C idiom, e.g. to declare:

CUP cup;

But I think that's just more laziness -- surely one could think of a
more suitable name for this particular CUP variable!

Anyway, I think the key point is that Ada follows conventional
language useage, while case-sensitive languages don't.

Mike