Many (including myself) would argue it is NOT stupid, but rather a safety feature. I don't think that decision was made to save space or support wierd character sets. This debate will never be settled and no matter which decision the designers made, someone would have been unhappy with it. I believe they opted for reliability, eliminating one common source of errors at the expense of ticking-off a bunch of C users. MDC -- Marin David Condic Senior Software Engineer Pace Micro Technology Americas www.pacemicro.com Enabling the digital revolution e-Mail: marin.condic@pacemicro.com Web: http://www.mcondic.com/ "Gerhard H�ring" wrote in message news:slrn9sle58.gs.gerhard.nospam@lilith.hqd-internal... > > True. The compiler probably should show a warning in this case. But > Ada's case insensitivity is so stupid it hurts. Don't tell me it's > needed for your weird 7 bit processor with EBDIC (sp?) character set. > Cross-compile if you need to support such broken processors. > > I want inconsistent casing to be a syntax error in a language. Oh yes. > And the keywords be either lower or upper case, too (I'd prefer upper > case as in MODULA-2/3).