Case insensitivity

[Quinn Dunkan]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2001 23:42:37 GMT, Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com> wrote:
>The moment that any programming language becomes tool-
>dependent, that language is dead to me. I tried fiddling with
>Lisp-without-Emacs for most of a year. It didn't work out. I can
>think of few programming-related things more onerous than
>a programming language which requires you to learn its editor.
>
>Never again.

Hmm, I've been writing scheme for a while, and just started doing stuff with
lisp, and I've never felt the need to go anywhere near emacs.  Most 'vi's have
paren matching and lisp indent, but I've also happily used acme, which has
neither of these.

But I agree with the sentiment against "you will use our tools" monolithic
style languages, because my tools are usually very different from theirs.
I've never really gotten going with SmallTalk, for instance, because that
requires completely converting to that world, which raises the barrier to
entry quite a bit.

>>If case-preservation were tool-enforced, then all of us would
>>essentially have to use those tools.

I don't understand this assertion, however.  What keeps you from continuing to
use vim, ed, windows notepad, whatever, in this case?  The language is exactly
the same.  The only difference you might see is some other people's code won't
be exploiting case sensitivity, but you still can (it's up to those other
people's case-insensitive warning systems to be smart enough to not constantly
make noise when using your modules).