Re: Three simple questions

[kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <39E47BAC.8DB1AD0B@acm.org> Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> writes:
>Ada is not case-sensitive because case-sensitivity is a bad idea. In
>normal English usage, there is no significant difference between "Marin"
>or "MARIN" or mArIn". Readers would interpret that to mean a reference to
>me. Identifiers in a program are likely to be similarly interpreted on
>cursory inspection, so it would be a bad idea to have "x" mean an entirely
>different variable than "X". Too much opportunity for subtle bugs.

In addition, as somebody pointed out in a subtle way, it makes it much
harder to have a verbal conversation about a program.  If you have
RollControl, rollControl, Rollcontrol, and rollcontrol variables, all
meaning different things, when you try to discuss code that uses them
verbally, it becomes a very confusing conversation really quickly
because we don't have normal English mechanisms to distinguish case.

Some would say this argues in favor of underscores not being
significant either, so you couldn't have a disinct Roll_Control
variable either, but "roll underscore control" sounds a lot smoother
than saying "each cycle we set the capital r roll capital c control
variable from the average of the lower-case r roll lower-case c
control, lower-case r roll capital c control, and capital r roll
lower-case c control variables"!