Case sensitivity

[Christian Tanzer]

Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Jacek Generowicz wrote:
>    ...
> >> Guido van Rossum wrote Wed, 25 Jul 2001 05:29:41 GMT:
> >> > But never mind, I'm giving up on making *Python* case-insensitive.
> >> > The hostility of the user community is frightening.
> >>
> >> Personally, I would mind x and X mean the same, but I would
> >> like if x and X would be forbidden to occur in one namespace.
> >
> > A good way of putting it. Maybe not forbidden, but it should certainly
> > be sufficently hard for both to occur, to make introducing both by
> > mistake effectively impossible.
> >
> >> When skimming the thread, Guido seems to be almost alone...
> >
> > FWIW, I'm with him on this one.
>
> I was with him then, I'm still with him, but he's right: we, the
> Python community, seem to have accumulated too many people with
> their main background in case-sensitive languages (C/C++/Perl/
> Java/...) rather than case-insensitive ones (Pascal/Eiffel/VB...)
> for case insensitivity to ever get a "fair hearing".  Pity:-(.

FWIW, I used case-insensitive languages for a decade before starting
to use case-sensitive languages and I still strongly prefer a language
to be case-sensitive. Being a german speaker might or might not have
an effect on this attitude.

Anyway, consider the amount of code broken by such a change.

-- 
Christian Tanzer                                         tanzer at swing.co.at
Glasauergasse 32                                       Tel: +43 1 876 62 36
A-1130 Vienna, Austria                                 Fax: +43 1 877 66 92