Re: Some questions about Ada.

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Adam said

"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."

(talking about confusion arising from random casing)

I see it! I think it is terrible Ada style to be inconsistent in casing
keywords or identifiers. In fact I think it is nice if the compiler has
an option to prevent such sloppiness (when we compile in internal GNAT
mode, consistent casing is enforced).

However, I think that having case sensitivity in languages is a very
bad idea. For one thing it makes it  very difficult to talk verbally about
programs, and if people really start defining identifiers like
Time_of_Day and Time_OF_Day to mean different things, then it damages
readability badly.