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From: The Ludwig Family <ludwigs@bellsouth.net>
Subject: Re: Three simple questions
Date: 2000/10/15
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Robert Dewar wrote:
 
> What to me is clear is that it is not a good idea to allow
> two different identifiers that differ only in casing to
> be simultaneously visible.
> 
> Incidentally, note that it is only computers that even for
> a moment dally with case sensitivity. In ordinary language,
> there are indeed style rules for capitalization, but the
> case of characters is not in general semantically significant.

That's not really true, as I'm sure you remember from your chemistry 
days.  Following rulings and recommendations from the CGPMs (French 
acronym for General Conferences on Weights and Measures, which are 
responsible by international treaty for defining the metric system) 
and ISO (particularly ISO 31 and ISO 1000), not only is case important, 
but also font (such as upright versus italics, serif versus sans serif, 
bold versus normal, ...) in the correct interpretation of symbols.

For example, take the letter s:
  as lower case, upright, not bolded, it means second (unit of time);
  as upper case, upright, not bolded, it means siemens (unit of 
     electrical conductance);
  as lower case, italics, not bolded, it typically means displacement;
  as upper case, italics, not bolded, it typically means surface or 
     surface area in mathematics, or entropy in thermodynamics;
  as upper case, italics, bolded, it typically means Poynting vector;
  and so on.
Upright and not bolded corresponds to units of measurement.
Italicized, not bolded corresponds to scalar variables.
Italicized, bolded corresponds to vectors.
Upright, bolded, sans serif corresponds to tensors.

Of course programming languages, indeed even Unicode, don't (and at 
least for the foreseeable future won't and even can't) make such 
distinctions, so we have to spell out our identifiers to make them 
more meaningful within the constraints of character sets for 
programming languages.

> If I spell my name
> 
> robert dewar
> 
> That looks a little peculiar, but no one thinks this is a
> different name from
> 
> Robert Dewar

Howard W. LUDWIG