Case insensitivity

Sheila King sheila at spamcop.net
Fri Jul 20 19:18:31 EDT 2001


On 20 Jul 2001 18:09:22 -0400, pinard at iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard)
wrote in comp.lang.python in article
<mailman.995666017.20422.python-list at python.org>:

:[Guido van Rossum]
:
:> To me, the only real important question is, how can we introduce
:> case-sensitivity for novices without breaking the millions of lines of
:> existing Python code.  One option could be: forget it, it's too late.
:> Another: put the case-insensitivity in the tools.
:
:(I presume you meant "case-insensitivity" on the second line of the above
:paragraph).
:
:Would not it be convenient, before asking "how", to wonder "why"?  The real
:prerequisite question might be to define quite precisely "What are we
:wanting to achieve, here?".  Once this done, another question might be to
:ask ourselves?  "Is modifying the language the proper answer to about how
:to reach the goals?", meaning the goals identified by the first question.
:
:I worry a bit that you state that the real important question is "how",
:as if you were trying to escape the prerequisite questions, or maybe trying
:to tell us that your mind got firm answers about them.

In an attempt to address the "why" of this problem, I have posted the
following article to two mailing lists to which I belong, for AP
Computer Science teachers:

> As some of you have probably noticed (or maybe not), I've become quite a
> fan of the Python programming language, lately. I follow the newsgroup
> comp.lang.python. Python is a language which is under development.
> 
> One of the recent language changes recently discussed in
> comp.lang.python has to do with whether identifiers should or should not
> be case-sensitive.
> 
> Those of us who programmed in Pascal, certainly recall the
> case-insensitivity of that programming language. And now that we are
> programming in C++, and moving to Java in another couple of years, we
> are programming in a case-sensitive language. Python is currently a
> case-sensitive language.
> 
> I would like to conduct a small survey on the issue of case-sensitivity
> in identifier names...
> 
> When answering these questions, please do not consider only AP level
> programming students, who are usually very sharp and often have
> programming experience, but please think of beginning programming
> students, and particularly those students who are not especially adept
> at programming.
> 
> Reply to: case at thinkspot.net if you please, and I will compile all the
> results, summarize them and report back to the list on the findings.
> 
> 1. Are you a computer science teacher?
> 
> 
> 2. In your experience, have you found that cs students, especially
> beginners, have difficulty due to case-sensitive identifier names?
> 
> 
> 3. If you were designing a new programming language, would you choose to
> make it case-sensitive or case-insensitive? Why?
> 
> 
> 4. If you were using a language that had an option to set some sort of
> flag or compiler directive to turn case-sensitivity off, would you use
> such a feature with a beginning class?
> 
> 
> 5. When trying to select a programming language for instructing
> beginning students, do you consider case-sensitivity to be an important
> factor in selecting a language for your beginning programming course?
> 
> 
> Any other comments?


If/when I get a reasonable number or responses, I will compile a summary
and post the results here.

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





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