Re: Three simple questions

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

Point taken, but I think this may be a bit contrived. Even C programmers (unless they're
trying to be "clever") are not likely to create a RollControl and a rollcontrol in the same
context. What is far more likely to be the case is when you've got one of those "quickie"
variables for a loop index or some logical test, etc, where you've got an "X" and an "x" that
exist in the same context. It would still be hard to verbally discuss them, but it is more
likely to be an accident than an intention.

Now I could imagine this possibly being a problem *across* contexts - say if a member variable
is defined in a C++ class one way and a local version is used in some function where the name
is different by case. That may happen a bit more regularly and it certainly would be confusing
to discuss "member variable RollControl" and "local variable rollcontrol".

Another good reason to use Ada - packages, dotted notation, case-insensitivity,... It all adds
up to more reliability.

MDC


Richard Kenner wrote:

> In addition, as somebody pointed out in a subtle way, it makes it much
> harder to have a verbal conversation about a program.  If you have
> RollControl, rollControl, Rollcontrol, and rollcontrol variables, all
> meaning different things, when you try to discuss code that uses them
> verbally, it becomes a very confusing conversation really quickly
> because we don't have normal English mechanisms to distinguish case.
>
> Some would say this argues in favor of underscores not being
> significant either, so you couldn't have a disinct Roll_Control
> variable either, but "roll underscore control" sounds a lot smoother
> than saying "each cycle we set the capital r roll capital c control
> variable from the average of the lower-case r roll lower-case c
> control, lower-case r roll capital c control, and capital r roll
> lower-case c control variables"!

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