Re: Some questions about Ada.

[clgonsal@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (Carl Laurence Gonsalves)]

In article <4me37a$ipl@krusty.irvine.com>,
Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com> wrote:
>clgonsal@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (Carl Laurence Gonsalves) writes:
>>
>>I'v also had to maintain Pascal programs where "end" was capitalized in
>>three different ways, at random. Case insensitivity makes the code harder
>>to read and harder to maintain, because one can be misled into thinking
>>that two different capitalizations of the same thing are distinct. . . .
>
>I don't understand this at all.  As far as I can see, about the only
>way you can be misled into thinking two different capitalizations mean
>different things is if you're used to programming only in C/C++ (or
>Modula).  Expecting different capitalizations to mean different things
>doesn't come from experience with most other well-known programming
>languages, since they don't care about case.  And it certainly can't
>come from any of our other learning; if I see a word capitalized at
>the beginning of a sentence, I am not misled into thinking its meaning
>is different from an entirely lower-case word.

In mathematics "x" and "X" are often used to represent two distinct
objects.

And even if one wouldn't be fooled into thinking "theodolite" is different
from "TheOdoLite", it's still very distracting having to mentally "convert"
everything to the same case. It's much more obvious that "foobar" and
"foobar"  are the same.

If the intent was really to prevent two distinct things from having names
that varied only by case, then there are better alternatives that were
pointed out by myself and someone else.

-- 
        Carl Laurence Gonsalves - clgonsal@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca
                   Computer Science, University of Waterloo
               http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~clgonsal/
                   http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~clgonsal/