Case Sensitivity and Learnability

[Glen Starchman]

Case sensitivity is a wonderful thing. With a language like VB which is not
case-sensitive (although the IDE will change all occurences of a variable to the
first defined case)  the developer may refer to objPerson as OBJperson,
oBJPeRsOn, etc... personally I find this annoying, and a terrible practice to
get into if the developer then has to write C code!

As for language keywords being case-sensitive... ditto! However, in the case of
keywords it forces the developer to think when typing a keyword. All in all a
good thing and makes for cleaner, more standard code... as long as someone
doesn't do something like:

def function(x,y):
    #do some silly stuff...

def FUNCTION(x,y):
    #be even more silly

f = FUNCTION(1,2)
F=function(1,2)

THAT makes for unreadable code!

;-)


Will Rose wrote:

> Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net> wrote:
> : On Sun, Jan 30, 2000 at 06:13:45PM +0000, Neel Krishnaswami wrote:
>
> :> Well, I'd prefer Python to be case-insensitive, just as a matter of my
> :> own preference. Eyeball grep is for me basically case-insensitive, and
> :> I have spent hours trying to find bugs caused by case errors, because
> :> my eyes just slide over the difference.
>
> : Funny, my eyeball grep is decidedly case-sensitive. N and n look very
> : differently, and I scan them very differently, too. I sooner have trouble
> : with 'I', 'l', '1' and in some fonts 'i', or '0' and 'O' and in some fonts
> : 'Q'. On my old Atari ST I used to have a perfect screen font (which came
> : with the Warp 9 screen accelerator) but unfortunately I have not been able
> : to find an adequate substitute on any of the UNIX or Windows systems i've
> : been working on, and I've been looking for over 5 years now ;)
>
> This discussion has made it pretty clear to me that there are (at least)
> two sorts of people - those who are case-sensitive readers, and those
> who aren't.  I don't know how one gets into one category or another; it
> doesn't seem to be language-sensitive.  (Is Japanese case-sensitive?).
> The existence of the two types would explain why so many people like
> the Microsoft CI/CP filesystems, which I, being case-sensitive, loathe.
> It also means that there is no real way of settling the argument, since
> each group will always prefer a different solution.
>
> Will
> cwr at cts.com