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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,66bc6b039f1e005d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: John English Subject: Re: Three simple questions Date: 2000/10/10 Message-ID: <39E2D51E.D0122F20@bton.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 679650268 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <2BED68CA963D6D55.A78776F656DA0452.75A61ED22116F1B6@lp.airnews.net> <39e2588f.21565740@news.demon.co.uk> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: news@bton.ac.uk X-Trace: saturn.bton.ac.uk 971167029 5753 193.62.183.204 (10 Oct 2000 08:37:09 GMT) Organization: University of Brighton Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 10 Oct 2000 08:37:09 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-10-10T08:37:09+00:00 List-Id: Frank Christiny wrote: > John McCabe wrote: > > Frank Christiny 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... ;-) ----------------------------------------------------------------- John English | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk Senior Lecturer | http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je Dept. of Computing | ** NON-PROFIT CD FOR CS STUDENTS ** University of Brighton | -- see http://burks.bton.ac.uk -----------------------------------------------------------------