Language change and code breaks

[John Finlay]

Most engineers likely weren't given any choice - i.e. FORTRAN was what was
available for many years and the only programming language taught to
engineers. Many of us were only too happy to leave the problems of FORTRAN
behind and use C, PASCAL and other languages. Others stayed with the beast
they knew.

Just to add a personal data point: I've taught quite a few people
something about C, Scheme, Lisp, Basic both formally and informally over
20 years and I never found anyone to have a problem with case sensitivity
- most seem to realize that something that looks different is different
i.e. name is not the same as NAME. This may have something to do with
speaking English. I usually find that other concepts are much more
difficult for beginners to grasp.

John

In article <cp7kwyqfce.fsf at cj20424-a.reston1.va.home.com>, "Guido van
Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote:


> Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> writes:
>> I'll just chime in to say that as one who uses Python for
>> science/engineering, I would be very unhappy not to be able to define
>> the variables h and H to mean two different things.  Engineers often
>> uses case to distinguish between the function and it's Fourier
>> transform for example.
> How did engineers cope with Fortran?  Fortran has long been the
> preferred language for engineers, after C.S. folks moved on to C and
> C++...
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)