Case sensitivity

John La Rooy nospampls.jlr at doctor.com
Mon Feb 24 16:52:29 EST 2003


Erik Max Francis wrote:
> Arthur wrote:
> 
> 
>>As much as I agree with what you are saying, it is most definitely not
>>what
>>I hear Alex saying.  He is saying that *he* - as a user - has trouble,
>>or at
>>least frustration, with case sensitivity.
> 
> 
> He explicitly used the word _beginner_ multiple times in his response,
> so it seems to me that he certainly is talking about beginner issues, at
> least in part.
> 

I certainly wouldn't teach a beginner from a book that used case 
inconsistently. When I learned Ada, I was told over and over how
much more time is spent *reading* the code compared to writing it.

To allow casesloppy programming so that "intel" won't cause an exception
when "Imtel" will is simply inconsistent. My version of laziness says
make it easy and clear to read later even if it is a little more work now.

I wonder how the casesloppy advocates are missing their spelling
mistakes with their unit tests. Unit tests are something that *should* 
be taught to beginners at the outset.

OK. So you are one of those people who writes entire programs and
suites of unit tests and they would all work first try if it wasn't
for that pesky casesensitivity. Find and Replace *will* fix this for you 
pretty quickly. Otherwise use an automagic casefixing editor.

John






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