case-sensitivity

Bengt Richter bokr at oz.net
Sat Dec 13 19:06:27 EST 2003


On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 20:31:46 GMT, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>Douglas Alan fed this fish to the penguins on Saturday 13 December 2003 
>01:03 am:
>
>> 
>> In the ol' days it was actually a semi-plausible argument that you
>> shouldn't make your identifies too long because you'd be too likely to
>> make a mistake when typing them.
>>
>        There was also the minor factor that, while the HOL might allow longer 
>(say 32 character) identifiers, if the HOL produced assembly output 
>rather than final binary, those identifiers were truncated to fit an 
>assembly pass that might only allow eight characters -- so any 
>identifier that was identical in the first eight characters was 
>considered the same by the assembler.
>
IIRC the old Pascal (as defined by Jensen/Wirth manual) also ignored
characters beyond 8 in identifiers, though I think it allowed them.

Regards,
Bengt Richter




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