Case Sensitivity and Learnability

[William Isaac Carroll]

Will Rose (cwr at crash.cts.com) said:
: 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.

Well, as far as Japanese goes, the traditional writing systems (Kanji,
Hiragana, and Katakana) don't have anything corresponding to case, so the
answer is, "not applicable". When writing Japanese in Romaji (Roman letters)
I am not sure of the capitalization rules, but I believe they're similar to
those of English.

My opinion is that a computer language should be case-sensitive, but only
allow one choice of case for each spelling. For example: if you have an
identifier "IFooYou" in your program, declaring another identifier such as
"ifooyou", or "IfooYOU" would be flagged as an error (or at least a warning).

Some programmers may want to declare a class "TV" and an instance of that
class "tv", and wouldn't like this restriction. I think the answer to that
is that the language be classless and prototype-based like Self or Cecil.
-- 
W Isaac Carroll (icarroll at pobox.com)

"People do not eat at once for all time, even when they eat a good deal."
        -- Planchet