Re: Three simple questions

[John English <je@bton.ac.uk>]

Frank Christiny wrote:
> John McCabe wrote:
> > Frank Christiny <fchris@pdq.net> wrote:
> > >2.  What is the rationale for case-insensitivity in the language?
> >
> > At least one reason is for safety against misspelling.
> [snip]
> 
>       Whoa!  So you are saying the original designers of the language
>    actually sat down and decided the majority of us programmers were
>    dislexic or something?   I am sure there is more to it than that!

(Dyslexic? Or was that a dilberate misspooling? Anyway...)

I'm dead against case sensitivity. For example, in Java you not only
have to remember a zillion API calls to do anything useful, you also
have to remember how they're capitalised. The Java rule is that class
names have EachWordCapitalised (or is that EachWordCapitalized? :-),
which is fine when you can remember whether "run time" is one word
or two (is it RuntimeException or RunTimeException?).

And of course, none of the compilers I've used will help tell you
what's wrong if you misspell something. You'd think they could add
error reporting for undeclared identifiers which would say "there's
no such thing as RunTimeException, but when I did a case-insensitive
check I found RuntimeException -- is that what you mean?". Of course,
the level of helpfulness that GNAT provides in error messages would
take all the fun out of programming in Java... ;-)

It gets even more fun with OOP; you think you've got a method called
DoThisNow and override it, but it's actually called doThisNow; the
result is two methods, one called doThisNow and the other called
DoThisNow, which are of course completely unrelated... and the
compiler will say nothing.

Since humans consider 'D' and 'd' to be variant representations of
the same letter, why shouldn't programming languages?

(This doesn't apply to language names like Ada/ADA, of course... but
I don't want to reopen that particular theological debate here... ;-)

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