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

[Neel Krishnaswami]

François Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> 
> I understand Guido's arguments, yet my feeling is that if you allow
> for confusion at such a basic level as the lexical level, the
> overall impact is much more deep than one might guess at first, and
> confusion might perniciously multiply in many more aspects all later
> works, all along. [...] I easily believe that studies might show
> that unaware people prefer insensitiveness, yet modifying Python so
> it favours unawareness might be a whole disservice to the overall
> programming community [...]

Perhaps you should look at languages that are case-insensitive, and
see if people have the problems you suspect they might? Large bodies
of source code for Common Lisp, Scheme and Dylan are available under
open-source licenses. Furthermore, Dejanews has archives of all of
these languages' newsgroups. You can read the code for yourself and
check the archives to see if anyone else has had problems with
case-insensitivity.

Suspicions are most easily dispelled/confirmed via evidence, and
taking the trouble to do this has the pleasant side-effect that you
can either cease expending effort worrying, or move directly to taking
positive action to correct the problem.


Neel