Case Sensitivity and Learnability

[Will Rose]

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