[Tutor] Tutor Digest, Vol 111, Issue 24

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 11/05/13 06:17, Alan Gauld wrote:

> Pascal is still case agnostic and in that community its often seen
> as a benefit since it avoids a whole class of "error" - when you type
> the case of a word wrongly...


Interesting that you say that. Just the other week I was reading a page somewhere talking about some Pascal compiler, and it made a comment that "by popular request" the next version would allow case sensitive variables.


Personally, I don't understand how moderately intelligent English-speaking people can apparently have so much trouble with capitalization. It's very simple: capitalization is the difference between:

"I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse."

and

"I helped my uncle jack off a horse."


Case sensitivity really helps when programming too. For example, the usual convention is that classes have an initial capital letter. (Although built-in classes tend to break this convention, mostly for pragmatic reasons.) Instances tend to be lower case. So for example I have code that looks like this:


history = History()  # actual code, copied from one of my modules


and to anyone who understands the convention, it is obvious: I take a History class, create an instance, and call it history. There is no conflict between the two, since they differ in case.


-- 
Steven