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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Three simple questions
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 03:25:15 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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Date: 2000-10-14T03:25:15+00:00
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In article <LVzA9mCZWcOB@eisner.decus.org>,
  Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) wrote:

> If you cannot get programmers to agree on style, you have a
> people problem that cannot be solved with technology.  If
> somebody writes Runtime_Exception and someone else writes
> runtime_exception it is not the end of the world.

No, but it is a bug in my view. And tools can help. In the
GNAT sources, we require all style checks to be turned on
(indeed you cannot check in a unit without doing a style
check). One of the style checks is that all references to
a given entity use the same casing as the declaration.

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.

If I spell my name

robert dewar

That looks a little peculiar, but no one thinks this is a
different name from

Robert Dewar

:-)


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