RE: Case sensitivity (was Re: no title)

[Lionel.DRAGHI@fr.thalesgroup.com]

| -----Message d'origine-----
| De: Hyman Rosen [mailto:hyrosen@mail.com]
..
| Underline all you want. Of course this is just a style
| issue! If Ada had decided to forbid the letter 'e' in
| identifiers, it would still be a perfectly good language,
| but it would annoy people who want to use that letter and
| can't.
So not so perfect. 

| Instead, we have a language which considers
| Get_String and get_string but not GetString to be identical,
| and distinguishes between F00L and FOOL. I consider that
| perfectly arbitrary. If you insist upon insensitivity, I
| would ban digits from identifiers, and allow '_' as a
| non-semantic separator between letters just like it is used
| in Ada numbers.

Considering programming as a human activity is why Ada is a better langage.

- A normal human is used to read "get string", not "getstring". Identifer
with space is practically not possible, so the underscore do the job.
Get_String is still far easier to read than GetString. 
- A normal human will easily miss the "List" vs "list" difference, but he
won't confuse "List" and "The_List".
- A normal human prefer to read a phone number formatted 098 983 423 instead
of 098983423.
- A normal human understand "get string" exactly the same way than "Get
String". Allowing them to have different meaning is just setting traps.

Ada avoid traps as much as possible, increase readability as much as
possible, and without drawbacks.

-- 
Lionel Draghi.