From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,66bc6b039f1e005d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: kenner@lab.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) Subject: Re: Three simple questions Date: 2000/10/14 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 681331859 References: <2BED68CA963D6D55.A78776F656DA0452.75A61ED22116F1B6@lp.airnews.net> <39E47BAC.8DB1AD0B@acm.org> X-Trace: typhoon.nyu.edu 971524625 128.122.140.194 (Sat, 14 Oct 2000 07:57:05 EDT) Organization: New York University Ultracomputer Research Lab NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 07:57:05 EDT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-10-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <39E47BAC.8DB1AD0B@acm.org> Marin David Condic 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"!