Case Insensitivity (was Language change and code breaks)

[James Logajan]

Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> Did anyone ever do a study on this? All I have seen is
> anecdotical evidence (including mine, of course). Could we get input
> from someone who does Python teaching sufficiently regularly?

I'm not sure one needs to limit the input to just teachers who regularly
teach Python (although if so, then Mark Lutz may be a good one to ask).
Sheila King in another post on this thread has relevant experience to
relate.

Several years ago, Mark Lutz came to the company I was consulting at to
teach Python to a group of about 6 programmers and sometime-programmers, I
don't recall case sensitivity coming up as an issue. I DO recall indentation
being a problem for one fellow who took a while to learn to be less sloppy
about making his lines in a block of code all start at the same column.
There were other conceptual hurdles, but not case sensitivity.

With no evidence showing that such an incredibly disruptive change would
lead to a corresponding incredible advantage, I'm really wondering why this
issue is still being debated.

P.S. It WOULD break a lot of the code I've written, having adopted the ASN.1
naming conventions where instance names differ from type names only by the
case of the first letter.