Case insensitivity

[Sheila King]

On Fri, 20 Jul 2001 10:01:45 -0300, Gustavo Niemeyer
<niemeyer at conectiva.com> wrote in comp.lang.python in article
<mailman.995634453.9136.python-list at python.org>:

:Indeed, I don't think case-sensitiveness is something that will help
:non-programmers to get used to the language. You have so many factors
:to learn when you're starting, case sensitiveness will be just one more
:behavior of the language (not a wart at all).  On the other hand, I
:think that, if you create a case-insensitive tool or command line option
:and let users get used to it, it'll take forever to learn how to program
:in sensitive mode.

As a high school computer science teacher, I must agree. I have been
teaching C++ for the last couple of years, to students with no prior
programming experience. Aiyee! And, there were many things that gave
them difficulty. Missing closing braces. Misplaced semi-colons.
Forgetting "break" in a switch-statement.

But case-sensitivity was never an issue. I mentioned it one day, and
explained it, and I don't remember it ever being a problem, where a
student called me over to his/her machine and asked me for help finding
a bug, and it came out to be related to case-sensitivity. I don't
remember this happening even once. There were many other bugs that made
us tear our hair out, but never, never this.

--
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org/