Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[Dieter Maurer]

"Fredrik Lundh" <effbot at telia.com> writes on Sun, 21 May 2000 11:44:08 GMT:
>     "During the course of development, we tried very hard not to
>     modify the Python language. /.../ Unfortunately, we were ulti-
>     mately forced to abandon pure Python when testing revealed
>     two flaws in the language that made Python unusable by our
>     target audience: integer math and case sensitivity."
Q: Is the Alice projects target audience identical to that of Python?

>     "Python is case sensitive. While we, as programmers, were com-
>     fortable with this language feature, our user community suffered
>     much confusion over it.
Seems that programmers have few problems with case insensitivity.

Rather, they like it, because they can name similar things with
similar words (only different in case).

We have such things in German, too: e.g. Essen (substantive) and essen (verb).
For German, it would be wrong to have: "Essen" == "essen".
However, even otherwise case insensitive languages would respect
case in string constants (whose content are considered outside
the language).

>     "I note with some embarrassment that Hypercard, Pascal and LOGO
>     were designed for novice or infrequent programmers and each was
>     case insensitive. It may be that Microsoft's Visual Basic programming
>     environment provides the best of both worlds by following the user
>     to type in a case-insensitive way, while the programming environment
>     applies the proper case to the program text on behalf of the user
>     whenever possible."
I just reread the Pascal specification.
Nothing suggests that Pascal was supposed to be a case insentive
language.


Dieter