Re: Why not combine Ada and C++?

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Wes Groleau wrote:

> the _only_ justification for case sensitivity is backwards compatibility.


Only for people who refuse to consider the possibility of any language 
but English. Modern programming languages and operating systems allow 
names to be written in any of the world's languages. For those languages 
which have case at all (and for those which have more than two), the 
rules for changing case are extremely locale-dependent, 
context-sensitive, and not necessarily character-for-character. Instead 
of trying to incorporate all of this knowledge into compilers and 
operating systems, I find it much more reasonable for them to simply use 
the sequence of characters which they have been given.

And as far as causing confusion, Ada already allows the same name to 
mean multiple things. Quoting from Barnes,

	type Colour is (Red, Amber, Green);
	type Stone is (Amber, Beryl, Quartz);

So when you see Amber in the code, you don't instantly know what it 
refers to - you have to examine the context. Reading it aloud doesn't 
help either. I fail to see why this is any different than allowing 
identifiers to differ only in case.