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From: ka@sorry.no.email (Kenneth Almquist)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: The caselessness is one of the things I like best!
Date: 22 Oct 2001 16:27:02 -0400
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Date: 2001-10-22T16:27:02-04:00
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"Petter Fryklund" <qsbpefr@esavionics.se> wrote:
> If the only difference between two entities is the case,  I think the
> program will be very hard to maintain.

Not if you have an appropriate naming convention.  For example,
in a case sensitive variant of Ada you might write:

   package CAR is           -- package names are upper case

      type Car is private;  -- type names begin with an uppercase letter

      function current_speed(car : Car) return Speed;
                            -- other names are lower case
   end CAR;

You might ask about the risk that people will confuse, say, "car" with
"CAR".  First, while English is often case insensitive, my experience
is that people can learn to pay attention to case with a little
effort.  Ada programmers appear to have no problem distinguishing
between "Ada" and "ADA".

Second, the case differences are normally redundant: only one of "CAR"
and "car" will make sense in a particular context.  As far as the
compiler is concerned, we could replace "CAR" and "car" with "Car" and
"Car" because the name resolution code in the compiler should never
make a mistake.  Writing "CAR" and "car" rather than "Car" and "Car"
does help the human reader (once the human reader has spent some time
learning the convention) because it provides additional redundancy
which reduces the probability of human error.

Of course, since Ada is case insensitive, we don't have long arguments
over which names should use which casing.  So I think that the
decision to make Ada case insensitive does have the benefit of leading
to a more tranquil comp.lang.ada.   :-)
				Kenneth Almquist