Re: Case sensitivity [was Re: type names (was Re: Child package: private type and IO)]

["John G. Volan" <johnv@ac3i.dseg.ti.com>]

> On Wed, 04 Mar 1998 18:19:20 -0800, "John G. Volan"
> <johnv@ac3i.dseg.ti.com> wrote:
> 
> > ...
> > package and a type, so there are fewer things to name.  (2) Other
> > languages tend to be case-sensitive, so capitalization is available as a
> > mechanism for "marking". For instance, instead of having to say:
> > ...

Note that in the context of this paragraph it was pretty clear that I
was talking about other *object-oriented* languages.  Perhaps I should
have fully-qualified this sentence as: "The most popular modern
class-based object-oriented languages tend to be ..." :-)

Jeff Carter responded:
>
> Let's see, I've used
> 
> FORTRAN
> COBOL
> APL
> Pascal
> BASIC
> Databus
> MOBOL-2
> Several assemblers
> C
> LISP
> SNOBOL
> Ada
> 
> How many of these are case sensitive? One. So my experience is that
> "other languages" (than Ada) tend not to be case sensitive.

That's true, but out of the above set (to my knowledge) only Ada(95) is
a fully object-oriented language, per se. Okay, I'll give you Pascal if
you mean Object Pascal, and Lisp too if you mean CLOS, and COBOL as well
if you mean the recent object-oriented incarnation. (Not sure about
BASIC -- does e.g. Visual Basic do objects and classes?  Never heard of
MOBOL-2, what is that?)

So, of the major object-oriented contenders out there we have:

Case-Sensitive           Case-Insensitive
--------------           ----------------
Smalltalk                Ada
Eiffel                   Common Lisp Object System
C++                      Object Cobol (is that the name?)
Objective C              Object Pascal
Java
Modula-2/3

A 60%-40% split in favor of case-sensitivity. Hmm, not a landslide
victory ... but how useful and/or scientific is it to just list names of
languages? All that speaks to is the level of popularity of
case-sensitivity among the *designers* of object-oriented programming
languages. I'd wager if you did a scientific survey of object-oriented
*programmers* and weighted the scores by volume of actual *usage* of
these languages, the case :-) for case-sensitivity's popularity would be
pretty strong.

At any rate, my main point is not whether case-sensitivity is more
popular among object-oriented programmers than case-insensitivity (even
although I believe that to be true). And I'm not trying to make any
particular religious judgment about whether case-sensitivity is "better"
based solely on its popularity.

My point is simply that when case-sensitivity *is* available in an
object-oriented language, it somewhat reduces the mental workload for
the authors and readers of code: They don't need to resort to elaborate
schemes of agglutinating special suffixes or prefixes just to
distinguish object names from class/type names. Capitalization standards
alone can provide an adequate marking mechanism (at least to cover the
object-vs-class distinction).

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