Case Sensitivity and Learnability

[Glen Starchman]

The problem is that it lets people program very sloppily and sets a precedent for
failure when they undertake a case-sensitive language (most of the common ones).


Paul Prescod wrote:

> Glen Starchman wrote:
> >
> > Case sensitivity is a wonderful thing. With a language like VB which is not
> > case-sensitive (although the IDE will change all occurences of a variable to the
> > first defined case)  the developer may refer to objPerson as OBJperson,
> > oBJPeRsOn, etc... personally I find this annoying, and a terrible practice to
> > get into if the developer then has to write C code!
>
> If the IDE normalizes case for you, what's the problem?
>
> One of Visual Basic's great features is that the IDE helps you *a lot*
> to get things right. It is perfect for newbies. Python's case
> sensitivity would not be a problem if there was an IDE that detected
> when you had misused case and corrected it for you (...this probably
> requires type annotation....)
>
> Maybe the CP4E *debugger* should detect case sensitivity problems at
> runtime and should just "fix up" the source code.
>
> --
>  Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for himself
> "Ivory towers are no longer in order. We need ivory
> networks. Today, sitting quietly and thinking is the
> world´s greatest generator of wealth and prosperity."
>  - http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/print.asp?t=140