[Edu-sig] On case sensitivity

[Hank Fay]

Case consistency in place of case sensitivity will make it much easier to
convert xBase programmers to Python.

xBase programming is an interesting language to study from an historical
perspective: it has changed as needed to meet the needs of the users, rather
than the theoretical concepts of cs.  As a result, it has become more and
more productive over time.  Evolution to meet real life needs is a good
thing. <s>

Hank


http://www.prosysplus.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: edu-sig-admin@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-admin@python.org]On
> Behalf Of Guido van Rossum
> Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 9:53 AM
> To: edu-sig@python.org
> Cc: Randy
> Subject: [Edu-sig] On case sensitivity
>
>
> For those here who weren't at the recent Python Conference, it may be
> hard to understand the case sensitivity issue.  I'll try to explain
> some of the background.
>
> One of the best keynotes was given by Randy Pausch, who demonstrated
> Alice, a 3D virtual reality builder that uses Python as the control
> language (www.alice.org).  Randy is a very motivating speaker, and his
> stories and demos of small teams of 19-year old non-cs students
> creating interactive virtual worlds using Alice (and hence programming
> in Python) had the audience in awe.  He reminded us that we (the
> audience) were geeks -- who make up only one percent of the population
> -- and that we need to think about how we talk to non-geeks.
>
> Randy explained the importance of user testing, and mentioned that
> only two Python language issues were a problem: (1) case sensitivity
> and (2) integer division.  I believe he said that case sensitivity was
> by far the worst offender, affecting as many as 75% of the students.
> He also said that *that's it*.  No other Python features (used in
> Alice) caused problem for his audience.  The rest of the user testing
> dealt with things like how to express a quarter turn (the answer is
> 1/4, not 90, as we geeks think :-), and what to name rotations along
> the x/y/z axes (the answer is, surprising, turn left/right, turn
> up/down, and *roll* left/right).
>
> Alice now uses a modified Python interpreter which is case insensitive
> and where 1/4 returns 0.25.
>
> Randy's scientific evidence swayed many who were there into accepting
> that a language for "everybody" has to be case insensitive.
>
>
> For those who still don't like it, trust me that the programming
> environment will enforce case *consistency* -- if you name a function
> or variable "Spam", later references to it as "spam" or "SPAM" will
> quietly be changed to use "Spam".  There are also some ideas on how to
> start warning about dependencies on case sensitivity in Python 1.6.
> (We'll probably have to change the standard library in some places to
> make it conform!)
>
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>
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