Language change and code breaks

[Guido van Rossum]

"Joseph A. Knapka" <jknapka at earthlink.net> writes:

> FWIW, I am a relative newcomer to Python, with a lot of general
> programming experience (C,C++,Java,Tcl,Prolog,LISP,Perl...). I
> really love Python, but making it case-insensitive would put a
> very significant damper on my enthusiasm. Why would you want
> to intentionally reduce the symbol space available for names?

The number of symbols available is so much larger than the number of
distinct names you need that the reduction is irrelevant.

> Everyone knows that in normal usage, case carries meaning (bob
> vs Bob). How could it possibly benefit the beginner to violate
> that naive expectation? 

I know plenty of people who *sometime* write their name with a
lowercase letter.  I even know someone who writes the personal pronoun
"I" as "i", convinced that the form "I" would be pretentious.

You would be very surprised if email to JKnapka at EarthLink.Net was sent
to a different user than email to jknapka at earthlink.net.  There are
plenty of situations where one only has one case available, e.g. WHEN
CAPITALIZING FOR EMPHASIS or when typing with one finger.  In American
usage, the first letter of most words in section and chapter titles
are capitalized without changing the semantics.

For beginning typists, hunt-and-peck style, the shift key is one
complication they can do without, so beginners tools are often
case-forgiving.

But never mind, I'm giving up on making *Python* case-insensitive.
The hostility of the user community is frightening.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)