Re: Case insensitivity

[sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)]

So another non-important subject to have a long debate on!

Bruce Anderson (banderso@sagpd1.UUCP) writes:
>My question is, does everyone think that the case-insensitivity of
>Ada is a positive feature and if so why? Personally, if I see a
>variable 'aBcDe' and another one 'AbCdE' they don't immediately strike
>me as being the same and is therefore confusing when they are.

I'm somewhat split in this issue. I have never worked with case-
sensentive language except for the Unix file system where it is a pain.
(Was it an uppercase or not? Never remember.) Wait, Berkley Pascal
on Unix is case sensitive. Nice when your are porting programs...

I have been bitten by the trap I've hidden an outer constant (upper case 
only) with a local variable (upper case initial) and it took me quite
a while to see what I have done, when the comparison with the constant 
didn't give the expected result. 

On the other hand, in a case-sensitive language you declare: 
   Word_length : integer;
Someone else with another coding style comes in and modifies 
the program and in an inner block and adds:
   word_length : integr;
Then a third person modifies this block, and sloppily writes
   Something := Word_length;
and don't get corrected by the compiler.

Maybe a good rule would be to require the case in the declaration
to be kept, and disallow variation. I.e. once you have declared
"Word_length" you may not write "word_length" until you declare 
that name, which then hides "Word_length".
-- 
Erland Sommarskog
ENEA Data, Stockholm              This signature is not to be quoted.
sommar@enea.se