Re: Three simple questions

[wv12@my-deja.com]

In article <39E2D51E.D0122F20@bton.ac.uk>,

> 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?).

Case sensitivity enforces consistency among code produced by different
programmmers. Imagine programmer A insists on writing runTimeeXception
and programmer B insits writing runtimeexcception. Maybe you  yourself
on Monday decides to write runtimeException and on Tuesday,
RUNTIMEEXCEPTION. Now, that is sick. Well, if you can do anything
*useFUl* in Ada, you don't have to write it in Java.


>
> 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?
>
Human only invents ASCII where 'd' and 'D' has different values.

> (This doesn't apply to language names like Ada/ADA, of course... but
> I don't want to reopen that particular theological debate here... ;-)
>
The way I see it, case insensitive languages just show they are aging.
>


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.